well put, it is definitely wrong to copy and paste other peoples content, as well as mislead users as to what content is truly user generated or not.

I just find people so . . . unreliable.

Stephen, Happy Thanksgiving to you, too.

When YouTube cleared the infringing content off its service, it only amounted to a small fraction of the overall total.

Your source on that? Or do you practice "lazy, shoddy and misleading" commenting?

It's a holiday, so I'm not going to spend all day piling up evidence for you, but here's a sample. I went to iTunes and found that Beyonce has the #1 song download. So I went to YouTube and searched for Beyonce. 6120 results. Here's one that was added back in January, with 679,790 views. You do the math.

Now over to MySpace. Click Browse and choose the first profile at random. "Sweetness" by Jimmy Eats World. Is that "Miss Angelique's" band? I don't think so. Perhaps that's the reason for the big Universal Music lawsuit. I think it might be.

I never said "all," I said "much" -- perhaps I could have made a better word choice, but I certainly never made the extreme statement you seem to be attributing to me. I never mentioned Blogger, Flickr, or Live Journal. If you "make up" what I said, sure it makes for a much better rant, but a publishable letter to the editor this ain't.

You say: "the dirty little secret of 'user-generated' sites like YouTube and MySpace is that much of the content is not made by the users themselves — it’s appropriated from someone else." You say that - but you don't present a scrap of evident to prove that it's true.

When YouTube cleared the infringing content off its service, it only amounted to a small fraction of the overall total.

When you look at blogs - whether on Blogger, LiveJournal or elsewhere - almost none of the posts is of copyrighted material. People are writing their own posts, not 'stealing' others'.

Check out Flickr. How many 'stolen' photos are posted? Virtually none. People are posting their *own* photos.

Move on over to MySpace. Actually look at the accounts. Is the site dripping with 'stolen' content? Well no. It's actually pretty hard to find. Most of what you find there was created by the user.

This is really lazy, shoddy and misleading journalism. Why don't you write about things that are true, instead of things that you've made up and didn't even bother to verify?

Collage in visual art is already well established as part of fair use, as long as the elements used in the collage don't contain the "primary expression" of the original. So you can cut up 10 photos and rearrange the parts with no infringement, but you can't take one photo and paste a tiny piece of another photo on it and call it original.

What we need is the same standard for multimedia. If you have a video and a mostly unintelligable chunk of something is playing in the background, that shouldn't be infringement. I think the guideline should be this: can you take that repurposed content and recreate the original content in a form that is equivalent to the original? In other words, if your grandmother is lip-synching to Celine Dion in the background of your YouTube clip, could someone take that clip and manipulate it to end up with an audio track of just Celine singing that they'd want to play instead of buying her CDs?

That, to me, is where the line needs to clearly be drawn. If something is a remix that cannot replace the original, then no infringement takes place (defamation and trademark or tradedress violations might occur, but those are separate issues). But if you duplicate something in a form that someone could use instead of purchasing the original, then you are infringing.

Duchamp. Koons. Warhol.

A great tradition.

If they can show the transformative nature of the work, they can claim "art" as their legal shield.

""uses it as raw material in a novel way to create new information, new esthetics and new insights. Such use, whether successful or not artistically, is transformative."

Judge Louis L. Stanton of U.S. District Court

Of course the Google ads won't help their case ....

Sure... a lot of content is "user-appropriated" for now. After eons of being published to users are going to need some time to adjust to a world in which they are free to express themselves. For the person who has no history of being a publisher, writer, filmmaker, musician, artist.. the reflex is to take the input and crudely re-purpose it as output... instant expression. It's not all that different from what more sophisticated artists do... it's just missing any sort of interpretation, comment or point of view.

But let's not trumpet the death of "ugc" just yet. Over time, as these growing pains fade, users will develop more sophisticated technique and their "content" will move further from appropriation and closer to actual perspective based output. Couple that with the changing landscape of copyright and IP practices and we start to see that maybe today's buzz is not only a bunch smoke but maybe some fire as well.

"user-appropriated" content in myspace is minimal compared to youtube. the majority of what you'll see, if you actually have an account, are user photos, profile, comments and widgets. streaming music are usually provided by the bands themselves. although most of the music videos are user-appropriated, they're not all illegal either. most streamed from video code web sites such as getmusicvideocodes.com owned by yahoo.com.

there's article in the NY Times about the deal the big studios made with jYoutube before the Google takeover. it read like NY was accusing the big studios of racketeering. Mark Cuban believes that it was exactly the case. Check out his blog.

Hey, Scott.

In Korea, major portal services provide functionalities that make it easy for users to "scrape" other's entire content into one's blog. Even culturally, the whole concept of "digital copyright" is still very weak, especially among the younger generation users. The common term used in Korea is actually "UCC (User-Created Content)", but at times, it's been mocked/dubbed as "User-Copied Content" to denote how much copy-and-paste goes around on the Web. Accordingly, many services have been in tug-of-war's with content providers over copyright issues.

What's interesting is that purely user-created content is indeed increasing rapidly and many of these amateur content creators aren't necessarily in the "share-for-free" mode, thus demanding copyright protection over their own content for monetary or privacy reasons , like many other professional content providers. Ironicaly, many of those amateur users have experiences of having "appropritated" professional content. We'll see how it all pans out down the road. (At the same time, CC license is being widely adopted here as well)

While I'm heartened to hear from #8 that lawyers will win again (insert maniacal giggle here) and impressed with #1's lightning fast spam reflexes, I'll make a few points:

1 - "Secret"? Not so much, surely? I mean, the -tropolis was built openly and unabashedly off of appropriation, wasn't it? (And so far, of course, no one's lost an eye.)

2 - Does money change everything? By which I mean, now that there is money to be made and lost, will the -tropolis put down the bong, put away the tie-dye shirts and sandals, and start thinking differently about appropriation? The modern music industry was built on theft - would it be much of an exaggeration to say that most businesses built on intellectual peoperty were? - but once those who stole become those who own, they generally take a hard line on theft by others. The robber barons become the philanthropists, essentially. What now, for the -tropolis? Was YouTube's power move last week over Arrington's downloader a sign of things to come?

3 - On Mathew's point, at present there really isn't much of a legal distinction between uploading a Celine Dion song and uploading a self-created video that uses Celine Dion as background music, even if your grandmother is singing along in the background. I mean, in either case - Celine Dion? Are you insane?

No, what I meant was if you tried to perform it live you'd generally (insert fair use and fair dealing qualifications here blah-blah-blah) have to pay the piper (copyright includes the exclusive right to perform music, for example, and even to perform it poorly), so should it matter that it's recorded on video and uploaded to YouTube? Is the difference that you're performing it badly? Or is all about the grandmother?

If Mathew's right it's probably because we're sensing now that technology has given us an opportunity to explode creativity by exponentially multipying the number of people who can be inspired to creativity by the creativity of others. Naturally, that's a good thing (except for the Celine angle). But the issue always is whether the original creator ought to be compensated for that inspiration. That creator was, after all, the muse. And a good muse is hard to find these days. Is the difference perhaps that because so many more can now be inspired - to inspiring effect - that restricting that inspiration looks to be more costly to society than not adequately rewarding the muses?

4 - "Basic common sense tells you that if I were to take all of the content from another blog, publish it here, and then run ads against it, that would be wrong." Wait, isn't that YouTube's business model? I mean, that, but open to everyone, and YouTube hosts it? Just kidding, I know their hearts are pure and they were as shocked - shocked! - as everyone to see copying going on there (insert maniacal giggle here).

In 99 it was "content is king". Now today it's "who's content is king?"

My bet, the lawyers win most from this war.

Scott, as usual, you make some great points. I wonder if one day there will only be one person creating original content, and the rest of the world just slices and dices it in the vast echo-chamber of the web, creating millions of mashups on the same original piece.

I believe that in the end of the day, people still just want good content-- they don't care about the source. The thing with youtube is efficiency-- getting users to upload clips they have "made" is far more efficient then just dumping years and years of unedited legacy content on a website.

People like "content from people" only when it is superior or more efficient then professional content. For example, a lively discussion on metafilter.com (no VC money, profitable, one-man operation) cannot be duplicated by any sort of 'professional'. However the news stories and outbound links on the site are almost all to some sort of professional content. I don't want joe schmoe writing an article on Iraq, but I may be interested in 50 Joes with different perspectives discussing Iraq.

Mathew, indeed, fair use laws are about to be put under a microscope. But let's face it -- the bad lip synching videos are in the minority of appropriated content -- I'm talking about the wholesale appropriation.

Good points as usual, Scott. The flip side of the "user-appropriated content" equation, however, is that much of what companies like UMG are complaining about -- and pressuring Google and MySpace to cough up money for -- is content that appears as part of another piece of content. For example, a music video made by someone lip-synching to a song, or a skateboarding exploit with a homemade soundtrack. UMG would like to charge for any appearance of any part of a song in any format for any purpose, even if it's your grandmother singing along with Celine Dion. Is that a fair exercise of copyright? I would argue it isn't.

Good post on a well deserving subject. I have a lot to say about it in

http://www.degardener.com/2006/11/18/universal-music-group-playing-with-fire/

and in

http://www.degardener.com/2006/11/11/user-generated-content-the-hitch-hikers-guide-to-the-galaxy/