Oh come now Gautam...

_Everytime_ a video is taken down, God kills a kitten?  Hyperbole aside,
it's still a gross overstatement of the types of videos that are _mostly_
being taken down.  Although I'll admit that many legitimate works of the
type you rightly are concerned about have been targeted, most of the videos
targeted are not capturing 'discrete slices and slivers'--as you
suggest--but entire episodes of a given work.

Making a copy of a work in full isn't anymore enriching to the world than is
stealing a book from a store. That hasn't, and isn't likely to change, no
matter how revolutionary the new technology is.

Let's not kid ourselves here. Copyright law, at least the spirit of the
letter, still remains alive, viable and necessary. The better question isn't
whether it's outserved its purpose (it hasn't), but to what end it can be
amended and adapted to meet the changing needs of the times.

There are kludgy bits in the code of copyright. Not many (thankfully) but
enough to make it a headache for a lot of otherwise well-meaning folks.
That's unfortunate, but changable.  It's not a call to scrap the system
entirely.

C


On Fri, Sep 26, 2008 at 12:50 AM, Gautam John <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

> I've been thinking about Youtube and, in particular, hosted clips of
> sporting and other news worthy events.
>
> Never before have we had the ability to capture so many snapshots of
> milestones in history from varying perspectives and I'm beginning to
> feel that copyright law has overreached its domain even if only
> morally and not necessarily in the letter of
> the law.
>
> Youtube and Flickr and other such services seem to function as a
> shared societal archive with discrete slices and slivers saved over
> time and it makes for a so much richer commentary when you are able to
> reference these slivers on demand.
>
> Every time a video is taken down for copyright infringement, God kills a
> kitten.
>
>
> --
> Please read our new blog at: http://blog.prathambooks.org
>
>

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