Copyright Law Is Dead, and We Killed Her

How copyright law is dead and how YouTube came out on front.

As Hank Green famously said: “We have destroyed copyright law.”

Prior to the internet, piracy still existed of course. We still recorded television, radio, etc. It was just much harder. It wasn’t until the late-90s that Napster introduced peer-to-peer file sharing, allowing users to mass share things across the internet with almost zero effort.

YouTube and the age of internet piracy.

At its birth, YouTube played a large part in piracy. The platform certainly would not be where it is if not for pirated episodes of The Daily Show where I could watch Jon Stewart be an absolute genius.

With pressure from Viacom, the RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America), and others, YouTube eventually created and delivered an algorithm to check every moment of every single video and check it for copyright infringement.

In Hank Green’s video, he eloquently explains — as he usually does — how the rights-holders, nor YouTube for that matter, do not actually want to stop copyright infringement entirely. Most of the content given copyright notices on the platform are given “copyright claims” where the money that would’ve gone to the…