An interesting article on Slate.com today about how the mid-nineties debates over copyright laws for the burgeoning internet left a “safe harbor” for websites that feature user-generated content.
Initially designed to keep giant corporations like Time Warner from getting in trouble for the things AOL customers were posting on their user pages, the law now lets websites like MySpace, Blogger, Wikipedia and YouTube off the hook for all of the pirated material their users post on cyberspace.
My favorite paragraph from the article:
“There may also be deeper differences. If the Internet were not a bookstore, or tubes, but rather a red-light district, YouTube would best be imagined as the hotel, and Napster, well, the pimp. YouTube, like a hotel, provides space for people to do things, legal or not. It’s not doing anything illegal itself, but its visitors may be. But Napster, everyone more or less now admits, was cast as the pimp: It was mainly a means of getting illegal stuff. Right or wrong, we seem to accept the benign vision of YouTube as an entity which, unlike Napster, was basically born as a place to showcase stupid human tricks.”
