Lucas Hilderbrand is an associate professor for film and media studies, visual studies, and women’s studies at UC Irvine. He received his Ph.D. in 2006 from New York University in Cinema Studies. His article, YouTube: Where Cultural Memory and Copyright Converge, discusses the impact social media, YouTube in specific, has on access to information and debates copyright issues that arise with the massive redistribution of information. Hilderbrand believes that information on YouTube should be available to view and use without violation of copyright laws. He refers to the Betamax case for justification of why YouTube should remain without severe privacy or copyright restrictions. The Betamax case had three significant findings:
First, that home video recorders must be allowed because of their potential for non-infringing uses; second, that the dominant uses of the machines were for timeshifting…and third, that Sony could not be held liable for its customers’ misuses of the machines. The court saw fit to expand the definition of fair use—reproduction of copyrighted content for educational uses—to include personal consumptive uses as a way to broaden the potential audiences for television programming and serve a broader public interest.
Hilderbrand states that YouTube is less of a “peer-to-peer” site, and more of an information collection site in which people can post copied, appropriated, or original videos for others to see. He argues that YouTube is user friendly, offers a large variety of content, and allows for instantaneous discoveries. He explains that YouTube does not only provide funny videos, but it also serves as an educational outlet:
I am suggesting that YouTube does not pro- mote willy-nilly piracy but rather enables access to culturally significant texts that would otherwise be elusive and the ability to repurpose videos in the creation of new derivative works.
YouTube makes life easier for professors because they have access to educational material that they would otherwise not have access to. The rapid speed comes in exchange for poor quality and fosters entitlement and instant gratification. Our society has become comfortable with the vast amount of information we have available at our fingertips. This makes it difficult to imagine a day without access to whatever we want:
Perhaps more than at any time before, audiences and users seem to reject the content in- dustry’s proprietary claims, complaining when a video goes offline or even reposting new versions of formerly disabled clips. Expectations for access have developed into a sense of access entitlement.
It has become increasingly common for YouTube to remove links due to “infringement” and there have been lawsuits against YouTube for copyright. Although videos are often re-posted, Hilderbrand makes an excellent point that most people on YouTube are not trying to take credit for other people’s creations, in fact, most people simply share the YouTube link in an email to their friends. In this sense, the video is still being shown from the original uploader’s site, and the video has not been downloaded or reproduced.
At base, copyright allows rights owners the right of publication and, in exchange for offering cultural works for public consumption, of profiting from such publication.
It is a fine line to balance when considering copyright laws. We must face the reality that movies, television shows, concerts, lectures, etc. are now readily available online. What are we as a society going to do about regulation of these videos? Should we charge a fee to view or download them, or should we allow them to be free to all? With such rapid reproduction of the same video it has become increasingly difficult to pin down the original owner of the video. People who decide to post their videos on YouTube should realize that their clip is most likely going to be re-posted and they may lose control over the direction their clip takes. If someone does not want their clip reproduced, they should not upload it. Perhaps copyright laws will eventually come to a solution on how to better regulate the redistribution of videos on YouTube, but until then, individuals must fend for themselves in order to protect the ownership of their videos.