Blog . Jiboneus

YouTube has been getting much bad press lately with all the legal issue surrounding them. From the silly case of a tubing equipment company, UTube, suing them for the name and the all too familiar issue with with tons of copyrighted materials being uploaded on the website.

There is also the issue of Saddam’s execution video being up on YouTube before mainstream media could get their hands on them.

I’m one with the idea of citizens journalism and YouTube is great service to enhance the movement. Anybody could take a video on anything, any news happening around them and upload it to YouTube. Imagine never again to rely to big giant media companies to know about what is going on.

Back to YouTube’s legal woes, recently a Brazilian model Daniela Cicarelli, ex-wife of Ronaldo, is sueing YouTube because of a video of her sex tape was uploaded to YouTube. She demanded over $100,000 in damages for every day her sex tape stayed up. Of cause YouTube pull down her video, but once something had been on the Internet, it almost instantly goes into thousands of hard disk. You can never remove it all together. In this case, whenever YouTube pull down one of the video, 5 other YouTube user uploaded the same video back. YouTube needs to roll out it’s copyright protection technology soon.

So next Cicarelli demanded that YouTube be shut down until all of her clip is permanently removed. A court in Brazil has ordered that YouTube should shut down until it remove all the celebrity sex video. This could not happen, YouTube can’t be bothered to shutdown it’s site because of one model’s scandal sex tape got out.

Then again, YouTube access has been blocked from Brazil. Reports (via Mashable) say that BrasilTelecom, the most popular phone company in South brazil has block access to the site. This does surprise me, that a sex tape of a model could leads to an nationwide block on the access of a site.

It seem that governments and big time corporation does not care or give a damn to 2006’s person of the year, You! (according to the recent write-up in Time magazine).

This, and several other similar cases, rises the question of who to blame. If someone stabbed somebody with a knife, do the company that makes the knife takes the blame? Or the actual person with knife in hand that did the actual stabbing takes the blame? Can this metaphor be used in online world?

In this case is YouTube to be blame because of the actions of it’s users? Why go after YouTube and not the user who upload and distributed the video? Or better yet, why not go after the paparazi who took the video in the first place?

Same goes to the once popular Napster peer-to-peer software. Is the technology to be blame or the users that use it to distributed copyrighted materials. Yes this question have been asked a million times before, even during the days of Napster’s battle with the legal system.

Why not just sue the Internet, and shut down the whole Internet until all of Daniela Cicarelli’s sex tape video have been removed? Because YouTube is not the only video sharing site out there. Just Google for ‘Daniela Cicarelli’ and you will see what I mean, whats next? Ordered Google to shutdown?

If I were YouTube I’ll do the Piratebay stunt. Once BrasilTelecom un-block the access to the site, YouTube should block all access coming from BrasilTelecom. This will surely piss of a lot of it’s customers and they might end up switching providers. However if there were only one main provider in Brazil, and that happens to be BrasilTelecom, that move would just piss of their customers. I’m not that business savvy but I think it is pretty bad for your business if you get on your customer’s nerve.

I would like to here your take on this issue, so please drop a line in the comments.

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