According to a recent article on TechCrunch,

MySpace announced this morning that it is offering free indexing to any content producers who want to block users from uploading their copyrighted videos. The site has been offering audio filtering and limited video filtering since late last year.

From my experience, very few people use the video feature of MySpace anyway and rely on YouTube. Maybe I’m wrong? What does this really mean though? From what I can read of the article, nothing. It means that major industry will have to go through and send a request to MySpace to let them know that this or that material is copyrighted and cannot be hosted on the MySpace servers.

The political cost of trying to tame the Wild West, though, is still unclear. The debate over what constitutes fair use, for example, could become largely moot if one side of the debate can lock its position down with a technology filter.

For the most part, this really isn’t a problem, the vast majority of video on MySpace and every other social video site is user generated. Satires will always be a major part of video, hence the popularity of Saturday Night Live after all these years, but how much is going to be allowed. From the legal standpoint, it makes sense for MySpace to do this, from the end user however, filtering uploaded material could lead to several million unhappy users.

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