Kudos to The Washington Post for running this morning a letter I wrote decrying what the recent decision in the Viacom suit against YouTube means for individual artists and creators. If like me you receive the dead-tree version of the paper at home, the letter is on A16, the editorial page, second from the top. You can find the letter online here.

The letter, in short, echoes the remarks I made in this space last week, that the court failed to consider the impact on individual artists and creators by green-lighting a world where anyone can take and use online anything they like with a conscious business model of theft, as long as they respond when the rightsholder learns of the infringement and sends a polite request to please stop.

I am a firm believer in sending traffic to newspaper sites, and as a former journalist am horrified at how people say they now get their news from “Twitter” and “the Internet” and “friends,” without realizing that as Pew documented recently, 99% of that “news” originated from a mainstream news source (that is, a reporter asking questions and an editor making the copy snap). So I won’t reprint the letter here. Follow the link to the letter, then click around on some random links on the Post web site. I hope you experience the “serendipity effect” that a physical newspaper brings and find items that surprise and delight you!

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 30th, 2010 at 5:38 am by Patrick Ross and is filed under copyright law, creators, piracy, web 2.0. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.