In Hong Kong uploading and downloading copyrighted material without permission by the right owner is illegal
Hong Kong’s Motion Picture Industry Association (MPIA) estimated to have lost 308 million U.S. dollar, because of copyright piracy on YouTube. Read Karen Chu’s Hollywood Reporter article here. MPIA is referring that the Hamburger Landgericht’s decision in GEMA versus YouTube should be applied again to illegally uploaded Hong Kong movies. Read more about GEMA v. YouTube in Brigit Clark’s IP Kat analysis here. MPIA’s case shines a light on the ownership issue.
It all boils down to …
– Internet users that can upload anything without proving their ownership;
– Rights holders that can must proof their ownership before they can let the OSP take down the copyright pirated content.
Proposal: to move from a first-to-create to a first-to-file assumption of ownership:
A more balanced relation between the right and obligation seems desirable. A first-to-file system could be considered in which right holders upload the content themselves on OSPs’ database, but have control whether to communicate it to the public. In other words, the uploader can decide to keep the content under water, or show it to the public, partly or completely. This way the OSP can filter every content that is identical to the already uploaded content by the one who filed first on their database. This does not solve the problem of illegitimate uploads, but it mitigates the problem significantly, since in general rights holders have control to be the first to file the content.
What is your take on this? Let me know. Danny Friedmann, editor IP Dragon