This depends on your point of view. If someone asked me to pay them a royalty because I was listening to their CD in my car with the windows down and people at the roadside heard it I would think they were a little out of order. If I was using their work in an enterprise of my own that was intended to make me money (even if it didn’t) then they would be justified in asking for dues.

The fan at the Steely Dan concert probably ignored the T’s&C’s on the back of the ticket forbidding making sound or picture recordings to obtain their footage. This has been historically ignored and often interpreted as the use of ‘professional’ recording or camera equipment, implying an intention to sell the captured performance for personal gain. The tape recorder down the pants or compact camera is usually ignored as whatever results is unlikely to compete with anything the artist attempts to sell themselves or has licenced others to sell on their behalf.

High-megapixel digital cameras in cellphones and miniature DV cameras and the like have changed that forever. Suddenly it is possible to obtain near-broadcast quality capture from simple consumer mainstream devices that can be carried in a shirt pocket. When that sort of footage starts showing up online you can bet the lawyers are going to take an interest.

If it so happens that said footage is posted online on sites with banner ads, sidebar ads, targetted ads, more ads than you can shake a stick at, the lawyer is quite rightly going to conclude that someone is making money while people watch the unlawfully obtained work of his client. It would not be unreasonable in such a circumstance to expect to be able to query where your share is.

Google (or whatever the accused website is) is likely to simply remove the content before being whacked with a DMCA and hope that does it. It probably can work out what clickthrough revenue was generated from the posted work but it knows once it begins to settle in such a way it will be fallen upon in a feeding frenzy. What we are seeing might be the beginning of that frenzy and may lead to the dissolution of the major media sharing sites, which would be a shame.

Summing up, the real blame is on the person posting work they don’t actually have any right to claim copyright over, but it can probably be argued that the carrier (website) should require more proof than ‘please tick to confirm this is yours to give me’. If the original artist was fine with third parties filming them and allowing others to profit with no kickback to themselves they would not attempt to prevent people filming them in the first place. If the whole thing wasn’t so driven by advertising revenue it probably wouldn’t matter. The carrier themselves aren’t actually stealing work but they are conveniently failing to ensure that what they carry is legal.

Google is a big business. They deal in advertising. There is such a potential conflict between this and ‘do no evil’ that it astonishes me people still parrot the line like it makes everything ok.

When the Performing Rights Society demanded more money for music videos streamed from the website, Google reacted by refusing to pay the requested 0.22p per play and took down the videos of the artists concerned.

Despite the aura of heroic young enterprise that still miraculously attaches to the web, what we are seeing is a much older and toxic capitalist model – the classic monopoly that destroys industries and individual enterprise in its bid for ever greater profits.

I tend to agree with Porter’s analysis, though the existing law allows Google to exploit people–artists, especially–and make millions a month (or week, really) in ad revenue. At least the contracts could be more specified; yet many videos are posted without Artiste A’s approval.

Some consumer X posts his favorite video moments from Steely Dan’s tour last summer, and he gets 10 thousand+ hits (or one million+–some of the hit counts are outrageous), and one of SD’s sideman–not exactly living in Malibu next to Britney, etc– says ah wants to be paid when people click on to that, or something. Usually Google just takes down stuff when there’s a problem, but it seems reasonable that artists should be paid when consumers click onto their product .

Schmidt/Page/Brin of GoogleCo are filthy rich, beyond Carnegies, Mellons, JP Morgans, and as Porter notes, they do have a virtual monopoly. So why don’t the courts, or say Pelosicrats get involved? ( Mainly because they’re ….DINOs.). For that matter, Google (and other silicon corp. giants) contributed a lot of money to ObamaCo, so they’ve probably been given some type of immunity from anti-trust (at least Clinton’s boy tried to go after Microsoft, though they didn’t accomplish what they wanted to).

Yes. Google’s about like an online Standard Oil, or US Steel, JP Morgan, etc. (then so are yahoo, MSN, oracle, etc) Schmidt, Brin, Page reiterate Carnegies, Rockefellers, JP Morgan, etc.: they just use servers instead of factories.

That said, the Feds and existing laws allowed the Search engine monopoly. Another de-reg phenomena. Do you blame the casinos, and casino owners, or do you blame the politicians who allow the casinos (not to say citizens who voted ‘em in), or don’t really do anything to stop it? In a sense the politicians–and the system–as much to blame as corp. execs.