In this forum from a meeting of the 2007 American Bar Association Forum titled “Legal and Business Issues in the New Internet World of User Generated Content & Social Networking,” panelists Armando Llorens, Bobby Rosenbloum, Debbie Spander, Elliott Peters and Zahava Levine engage in a spirited and entertaining discussion of two main questions: how have advances in user-generated content and the technologies that enable digital content sharing outstripped the ability of existing law to define and regulate this market; and is there a way to effectively rein in user-generated content so that the level of creativity is not constrained, but any rights-holders get their fair payment for the use of the copyrighted material they control? Or will the next few years be an endless game of cat-and-mouse between licensing bodies and illegal downloaders, with no good solution in sight that will be mutually beneficial for all parties involved? As the panelists are a mix of old- and new-media advocates and private practitioners, they rarely all agree on much and instead bring a number of fresh perspectives to the difficult questions they address.

Zahava Levine, Chief Counsel for YouTube, takes a moment at a meeting of the American Bar Association in late 2007 to discuss a few topics of interest to music and technology fans: the uses and limits of “fair use”; why the public needs to be better educated by content providers about copyright law; what internet video portals are doing to help copyright holders manage their online presence; and what the future holds for the music industry as it faces new challenges.

In this clip from a 2007 American Bar Association Forum titled “Legal and Business Issues in the New Internet World of User Generated Content & Social Networking,” the panelists begin to discuss the central questions that surround user-generated content from a legal perspective – that is: generally speaking, is user-generated content on the internet really original, or does it mostly incorporate existing intellectual property; how to enforce copyright claims on virally marketed content that does exploit existing copyrighted works; and how to achieve a balance between the needs of rights-holders and internet consumers that is legally workable and sensible?

Zahava Levine, Chief Counsel for YouTube, takes a moment at a meeting of the American Bar Association in late 2007 to discuss the need for the general public to become better educated in copyright law and what is and is not fair use of copyrighted material.

In this clip from a 2007 American Bar Association Forum titled “Legal and Business Issues in the New Internet World of User Generated Content & Social Networking,” panelist Zahava Levine discusses how her company – YouTube – works with copyright holders to protect and restrict copyrighted works from being disseminated, and how she and her staff approach the task of educating and guiding YouTube users in the differences between theft of intellectual property, fair use, and original content. She also shares her legal perspectives on the DMCA and how that act’s “fair harbor” provisions work in practice to protect services like internet service providers and content delivery portals like YouTube.

Zahava Levine, Chief Counsel for YouTube, takes a moment at a meeting of the American Bar Association in late 2007 to discuss recent efforts by her company and by Google to find technologies that maximize the ability for people to create and post original works, while respecting the rights of owners of copyrighted videos to not have them posted without permission.

In this clip from a 2007 American Bar Association Forum titled “Legal and Business Issues in the New Internet World of User Generated Content & Social Networking,” the panelists discuss how the process of licensing music for online use might be streamlined, considering, as one panelist puts it, “to call [the current process] a nightmare would be a vast understatement.” They discuss how the process of licensing all online content – including music –might be rethought to take account of modern realities.

In this clip from a 2007 American Bar Association Forum titled “Legal and Business Issues in the New Internet World of User Generated Content & Social Networking,” the panelists discuss whether filtering of internet content is a workable answer to the current problems the entertainment industry faces from piracy and other forms of illegal content sharing, and whether a new set of usage rights could be created to acknowledge how the online world actually works. They also debate whether the whole idea of “copyright control” has been invalidated by the realities of easy it is to copy, use, and make derivative works from content that exists online.

In this clip from a 2007 American Bar Association Forum titled “Legal and Business Issues in the New Internet World of User Generated Content & Social Networking,” the panelists discuss an audience question about what a just statutory rate might be for the non-interactive use of online content, and whether letting the US Congress set such a rate is a reasonable way to address the current mess that is the online content licensing process today. They also discuss: why music often seems to be treated as a special case to be considered apart from all other types of online content; why YouTube can’t use humans to filter copyrighted content the way they do to filter pornographic content; and what the future of sync licenses for music content looks like.