YouTube and Copyright Violations

The acquisition of YouTube by Google, which is the most expensive acquisition to date in Google´s history (Google had to pay 1.65 billion US dollars for the most popular online video portal), seems not without its problems. As I mentioned in yesterday´s post, many voices pointed to the problem "Who profits from user-created content?". Additionally, onother critical problem has been recently raised namely copyright violations on the Internet and the protection of proprietary rights. Heise online has recently published 2 news, dealing with that problem: "Bundesliga shows YouTube the red card", and "Bayern Munich takes on YouTube". As stated in the heise online news, "the DFL (Deutsche Fußball Liga GmbH) has been keeping a close eye on copyright violations on the Internet. The DFL's communications director Tom Bender told said: We have discovered that the dimensions are shocking. Apparently, even live broadcasts of Bundesliga games are being offered, some even for a fee. And downloads of game recaps are all over the place...YouTube is the main problem... The DFL says it will take all of these illegally shared videos seriously." and "The soccer club Bayern Munich club was not prepared to countenance any violations of its exclusive marketing rights by online platforms, Karl-Heinz Rummenigge, the chairman of the board of management of Bayern Munich, said".

The questions now are ...

1. Why those issues (though I do agree that they are very crucial problems) have only been raised after Google paid the 1.65 billion US dollars to YouTube?
2. And the more important question: Is this going to be the Web 2.0 problem?
   

Who profits from user-created content?

In a recent post, George Siemens pointed to a real problem "Who profits from user-created content?". "Over the last several years, end-user created content has been increasingly commercialized...and individuals are starting to ask for a piece of the revenue", George said. This issue has also been discussed in a post by Howard Rheingold who refered to an interesting post from Henry Jenkins about the Youtube acquisition. "This is an issue I raised here a few weeks ago. At the heart of the Web 2.0 movement is this idea that there is real value created by tapping the shared wisdom of grassroots communities, composed mostly of fans, hobbyists, and other amateur media makers. I have often celebrated these efforts as helping to pave the way for a more participatory culture -- one that will be more diverse and innovative because it expands the range of content we can access. Yet, as I suggested here a few weeks ago, there is a nagging question -- if these grassroots efforts are generating value (and in fact, wealth) and their creative power is being tapped by major corporations, at what point should they start receiving a share of revenue for their work?

We have all seen major media companies telling us that file-sharing is bad because it takes other people's intellectual property without just compensation. So, why are these same companies now taking their audience's intellectual property for free? Do we understand their profits primarily as a tax to support the infrastructure that enables their distribution?", Henry said.

GWT 1.2 RC1

The GWT team has announced the first release candidate for Google Web Toolkit 1.2 with Mac OS X support. As stated in the GWT blog, GWT 1.2 RC1 has a number of highly requested features and bug fixes:

• Full support for OS X development
  Develop with GWT on OS X as easily as on Linux and Windows
• Much faster hosted mode
  Debug your GWT apps much more quickly. Hosted mode startup time has improved significantly -- and even better, refreshes are now lightning-fast -- even when your source code changes.
• New HTTP request module
  The HTTP functionality that you've been asking for (custom headers, status code, timeouts, and more), all wrapped up in an API that's easier to use than the JavaScript XMLHttpRequest object
• Widgets in TreeItems
  Tree items can now contain arbitrary widgets -- finally, it's easy to create trees with checkboxes :-)

Google Acquires JotSpot

Google has recently acquired JotSpot, a Wiki maker system. On Google blog, JotSpot co-founder and CEO Joe Kraus wrote "As we built the business over the past three years Google consistently attracted our attention. We watched them acquire Writely, and launch Google Groups, Google Spreadsheets and Google Apps for Your Domain. It was pretty apparent that Google shared our vision for how groups of people can create, manage and share information online". It seems that Google is now targeting wiki-like collaboration tools. First Google added Writely to its Web 2.0 suite and now JotSpot.

Yahoo! Bookmarks

Yahoo! has recently launched a new beta service: Yahoo! Bookmarks. According to the Yahoo! bookmarks team, Yahoo! Bookmarks allow people to store their favorites from across the web and get to them from any computer connected to the Internet. New features of Yahoo! bookmarks include:

• Advanced search functionality
  
• Thumbnails for quickly recognizing sites
  
• Convenient drag-and-drop management
  
• Organize bookmarks with folders and tags
  
• Ability to save page content along with the URL
  
• Editing abilities when saving
  
• An end to the 1000 bookmark limit

Yahoo! already has 2 other services dealing with bookmarks: the well known del.icio.us and MyWeb. The Yahoo! bookmarks team states that Yahoo! Bookmarks will focus on personal saving, organization, and recovery while del.icio.us will concentrate on meeting social bookmarking and sharing needs and that users of MyWeb will in a few months be able to roll over to either Yahoo! Bookmarks or del.icio.us.