The issues of copyright and ownership rights for the intellectual property have become rather controversial in the modern society. Based on this, every country contributes to the regulation of intellectual property relationships by creating laws and acts that states where and by whom the piece of intellectual property can or cannot be used. In the United States of America such acts include the 1968 Copyright Act and 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act. These documents are especially important today because they clarify the use of copyrighted material by the web sites, networks, and other Internet resources. The major provision of the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act is that the sites serving as the file transmitters or distributors are not liable for hosting the files infringing the copyright laws by their users.
Thus, public sides are not considered copyright infringers if some of their users operate with the law infringing files on these sites. The reason for this is quite rational as the creators and owners of the web sites physically cannot control the whole process of file traffic on their sites. And they do not have to, because it is the fault of the user if he/she posts an illegal file on the site, and drawing from this the recent policies by such web sites as YouTube, MySpace, AT&T, etc. are hardly understandable.
These Internet resources start choosing to filter their traffic through the most updated computer software packages able of finding and blocking the content that infringes the copyright laws of the country. One of such software solutions is the Copyright software by Eyealike bale to detect the illegal files within 15 – 20 seconds of their running.
Thus, if the copyright laws and above mentioned acts are concerned, the sites like YouTube, MySpace, AT&T, etc. do not have to implement such strict control measures to filter their traffic and ensure completely legal content. The recently reported lawsuit filed by Viacom against YouTube for hosting the content that infringes the copyright laws is also not understandable from this point of view.
In this case, the lawsuit should be dismissed by the court on the basis of the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act that protects public web sites from responsibility for the content posted by their users. The same can be said about the recent AT&T initiatives to filter the traffic and ensure the hosting of only legal content in its networks. Involving huge additional costs and potential maintenance issues, the software detecting the illegal and copyright infringing content has no obvious benefits to the public web sites.
The only advantage of filtering the content is the possibility of concluding the deals with the copyright owners and guaranteeing the protection of their rights by AT&T or any other network deciding to implement such a policy. However, the drawbacks of the latter are more serious, as web sites filtering their content might turn to publishers from distributors and become liable the third-party content based on the fact that they control it and can influence its broadcasting. Thus, it is obviously unnecessary to implement content filters and software solutions to search for copyright infringements in the public web sites because the latter cannot be held liable for publications made by other people. Instead the copyright owners had rather consider some other, more effective, ways to protect their intellectual property.