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.

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?

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.