We've just seen a major announcement from a nice mix of creative companies and user-generated-content hosts (in some cases, the companies are both) — Disney, Microsoft, Viacom, CBS, Fox, MySpace, NBC Universal, Daily Motion and Veoh — that they have agreed on a set of principles for how creative works should be treated on UGC sites in the future. They all agree that the goal should be to use technology to block infringing works before they appear on a site and reduce the number of appearances to zero. But they also agree that user-generated content continue to flourish, and that solutions respect fair use. Furthermore, they agree that all parties need to participate in a clear, established dispute resolution process.

This has a lot of the largest content companies and several of the largest UGC sites (MySpace isn't just a large UGC site, it's dominates Internet traffic). One would hope that other content companies, such as large and small TV and film companies, sign on to the principles. (Presumably there was a need to limit the size of the group at first in order to have meaningfuly, concrete negotiations.) One would also hope other UGC companies, such as Google's YouTube, sign on.

Everybody wins in this new world. Consumers win because they'll be able to see all of the licensed content they want in numerous legal operations that aren't copeting with free-riding operations. UGC will still flourish. And individual creators of content will be free to practice fair use when making UGC without fear that their content will be blocked or taken down. And finally, creators will benefit because they will know their copyright still has some meaning on the Internet. No longer will the Internet be a place where others make money off of their hard work and creativity, while they watch helplessly.

We have a ways to go from principles to execution. Technology is not perfect, and even when it gets close to addressing a problem, the problem can change as new technology or consumer expectations emerge. This will require constant fine-tining. But this cooperation shows that such fine-tuning is possible. We don't have to keep going to court to tune it. We don't have to keep going to Capitol Hill to tune it. All parties can find what they need in the partnerships formed through the creation of these principles.

Call me a Pollyanna. But I believe that copyright is compatible with the digital age, and I believe consumers want creators to keep their rights in a digital age. The step announced today will go a long way toward that.

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This entry was posted on Thursday, October 18th, 2007 at 11:28 am by Patrick Ross and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.