| It could potentially kill all UGC. There is no foolproof way to determine the copyright status of a given piece of content, unless it happens to be a piece that you can demonstrate was published long enough ago that copyright must have expired. E.g. if website owners are made liable for the copyright of uploaded content, a successful (illegal) attack on any site hosting copyrighted content would be for two parties secretly cooperating (secretly, because conspiring like this would almost certainly in itself be illegal): One party operates an offline (to prevent it from showing up in Google searches or otherwise being easy for the copyright owners to identify as possibly infringing) newsletter that publishes assorted essays that might for example include responses suitable for the forum of a specific UGC site. They might be written specifically for that purpose... The other party uploads a copy of said content to the site. The first party sues the website. You could do this without someone cooperating with you to write custom-written content, but it'd be easier to spot that something was off, and since you wouldn't hold the copyright on the content you wouldn't have standing to sue so you'd be dependent on making third parties pissed off. Since you'd be infringing on copyright in the first place, it might be easier to just use an accomplice. All it takes is someone who dislikes you strongly enough, and you're potentially out of business if you depend on UGC in this kind of scenario... |