If Google wanted to make a big stink out of this, they could decide not to offer YouTube in Germany at all, citing the country's royalty laws as a reason it cannot operate viably there.
You make it seem a lot easier than it is. Youtube has tons of content, not specifically German, that I wager lots of Germans would like to watch.
But your point comes across, all the same. It'd be really nice, if all the big tech companies could band together in favor of internet protection. I'm sure if Google, Wikipedia, Twitter, and Facebook (just to name a few) would say "we won't operate in any country that filters internet content", I'm sure we'd be seeing much less of these actions. I suppose though, that may spark antitrust.
You actually mean a copyrightless internet. That's never actually existed or everyone would still be using KaZaA.
YouTube got greedy, they got slapped. Good for Germany for actually doing this to an American monopoly. Big deal.
YouTube lied for too long about it being able too expensive to filter content. But now suddenly they can do it! And that now coincides almost exactly with when they started to want to justify injecting ads into everyone's videos.
We're still in the scenario where aggregators, Google, YouTube, are making money when the content creators aren't.
So you've started a business, and against all odds you actually have users. Millions of them. Hundreds of millions of them. Now some ancient industry whose toes you've tread upon comes along and says, "Nein! Your users are doing things we don't like! It's your responsibility to stop them!"
You're telling me that your reaction would be, "you're right. We got greedy. Good for you for forcing us to police what millions of people are doing on our open forum."
No, you damned-well wouldn't. If you ran a taxi company, you wouldn't jump at the responsibility to ensure your fares aren't visiting prostitutes or high on drugs. If you built houses, you would not leap at the duty to ensure they weren't bought with drug money. Because that's not your problem. You aren't doing anything wrong; your customers are.
It's an ancient principle of common law that an individual (or corporation, now that we're playing that game) cannot be punished for the actions of another. This ruling, and your argument, violates that principle. You want to force a company to spend its shareholders' money on stopping other people from doing bad things, and there is quite simply no moral justification for such an edict.
'ancient principle of common law'? Well thanks for the laugh at least.
According to you if I make and sell bombs it's unreasonable for a government to say 'make sure you don't sell them to nutters'.
It's a stupid argument. Of course there's a moral justification for such an edict.
Say I started a LOIC server tomorrow that people can use to attack websites. It's on EC2 so can scale wonderfully on demand. You think I can use your 'ancient principle of common law'?
I'm all for better delivery mechanisms, better competition, all that shit, but YouTube were making money off other people's hard work. They've always played with fire. YouTube even sailed close to the line of where things like gorrilavids are these days. At one point you could go on there and find pretty much any tv show you wanted. Do you know how you found them? Search for [series name] episode [x] series [x] or some variation like that.
Does that actually sound that hard to detect these with a simple automatic script? A bank breaking script? It's supposed to be user generated content, not ripped off content.
One of the big appeals of youtube is that a submitted video is available everywhere (well majority of the countries). Google would rather pay hefty fines than lose that.
