The YouTube controversy, evolution or revolution?

In an intervention during a symposium for UNESCO in 2003, Jean Martin, a Professor of Law in Paris said that “evolutions have often been perceived as revolutions at the time.”

It seems like the Internet, although brand new innovation, took us back to the old times and the practice of paying good artists and kicking bad ones out of the stage by throwing tomatoes at them. YouTube represents just the same idea in the sense that acclaimed artists could generate a lot of money from advertisement through a partnership with Google for each viewing of their work on YouTube. The fact that in the absence of an agreement with Google the work would be posted anyway, stealing the right of distribution from artists is not new. Cases of large scale copying and distribution have been observed for illustrations in ancient manuscripts. This obviously did not eradicate creation...

One can claim that artists lose control over their work. However, such control rarely exists in the current state of the industry for artists oftentimes have to give up their rights and agree upon major distributing corporations' methods to get their work published. To come back to a more present scheme, artists do not have much control over their work anyway due to the existing exceptions to copyright infringement such as parody.

The clergy was unhappy to lose their monopoly when Guttenberg commercialized the printing press. The written press claimed they would be eradicated from the emergence of television. We always perceive evolutions as revolutions when they occur.

I do not have an answer to the copyright issues that the Viacom case raises but I beleive that the industry should work it out without resort to the judicial system. I strongly agree with Jean Martin's conclusion that “philosophical thinking is crucial. . . . There are choices to be made which should not be left to the jurists, and even less to law, for they represent decisions on the structure of society and law should only reflect the changes.”