TechWag

Bob Tur, the guy who filmed such greats as the OJ Simpson low speed car chase, the beating of a trucker during the LA Riots, and a bunch of other fun car chases, and other information is thinking about taking on Apple because the Iphone will play his videos that have been uploaded to YouTube without his permission. While the case of secondary liability has been an issue in the past with Zune paying money out to the music industry for every Zune sold to cover copyright infringement, the idea of holding apple liable for playing YouTube Videos has a much bigger audience than is immediately apparent.

On Bob’s line of thinking, the Apple Iphone plays youtube videos and is thus liable for secondary infringement of copyrighted works. The interesting part is that just about any media player, any flash player, and any web browser embed will also do the same thing. Let alone the other mobile devices like Motorola, and others. Realistically Bob’s line of thinking is that realistically any device that plays any encoding scheme is liable for secondary copyright infringement.

There comes the issue, and something that device makers have been dealing with for a long time now, if you look at the DRM schema within the HD-DVD and Blue Ray players here, the idea of making it near impossible to copy a disk is well known. It is also well hacked and broken near permanently. The Zune DRM system has also recently been broken as well. Just about any media player that understands YouTube’s encoding schema will play any file, not just Bob’s.

Even Viacom has not been so bold as to take on or whine about the media players in their lawsuit with YouTube and Google for promoting copyright infringement.

While we would like to think that this is a joke, in the copyright infringement game this is something that the device makers have been considering, and something that is being watched by groups like the EFF and Chilling Effects. The idea of secondary infringement came about because of Peer to Peer as a tactic to shut down the file sharing sites. As an unintended consequence of that, device makers are also starting to feel the pain.

We hope that Bob does not prevail, because if he does, device makers will have a much harder time of making anything that will not get litigated to death in court. While we understand that he has a right to make money off his stuff, the best choice would be to go after those that uploaded the content, not the device manufactures.

Tags: education, news, google, Politics //