On Jan 29, 2012, at 1:26 PM, David van Ooijen wrote: > YouTube asks me to prove it's Public Domain. I told them it's 18th > cenury music, come to us in manuscripts and old prints. And I asked > them what kind of prove they want for this.
And they haven't responded yet, I take it. They may not. > Is US-law like this: they can ask me to prove I'm innocent? Our > law-system the other way around: innocent until proven guilty, and > 'they' have to prove I'm guilty. "Guilt" and "innocence" are not very relevant here. Youtube isn't prosecuting you; it's trying to determine whether someone else is going to sue it for copyright infringement, or whether it is running afoul of the copyright laws of one of more than 200 countries. You're probably aware that it the United States, a proposed bill in Congress, imposing on websites the responsibility for making sure that they don't link to any copyright-infringing material, was killed a week ago after Wikipedia and other sites stirred up opposition on the web. The next day the US government indicted, and shut down, Megaupload, charging it with violating piracy laws. Some file-sharing sites shut themselves down within days. The copyright-infringing files on Youtube must number in the millions, so it's feeling the heat. It wants to avoid costly legal fights with well-heeled opponents like Disney or the RIAA. -- To get on or off this list see list information at http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~wbc/lute-admin/index.html
