Chris Boese's Weblog

Common carriers, hotels, and pimps, oh my! Net neutrality and the law

Link: The Spacey Gracey Review: The Magna Carta of Web 2.0.

Thanks to Spacey Gracey for the tip to check out this Slate article that really piles on the metaphors (except for Common Carrier, where'd it go?) for thinking about copyright issues, YouTube, Napster, and Net Neutrality.

Here we go! Let's take the plunge with Mr. Tim Wu. My comments interspersed among key excerpts below.

Link: How the Bell Lobby helped midwife YouTube. - By Tim Wu - Slate Magazine.

Does YouTube Really Have Legal Problems? How the Bell Lobby helped midwife YouTube.

By Tim Wu
Posted Thursday, Oct. 26, 2006, at 4:28 PM ET

When Google bought YouTube, the conventional wisdom—expressed in op-eds, newspaper articles, and scary editorial cartoons—was that they'd also bought themselves a whole heap of copyright trouble. The New York Times used the phrase "litigation-laden landmine." Part-time copyright theorist Mark Cuban warned that YouTube would face the same copyright fate as Napster.

There's only one problem with these theories: the copyright law itself. Under the copyright code, YouTube is in much better legal shape than anyone seems to want to accept. The site enjoys a strong legal "safe harbor," a law largely respected by the television and film industries for the choices it gives them.

But the most interesting thing is where all this legal armor protecting YouTube—and most of the Web 2.0 (user-generated content) industry—comes from. It's the product of the Bell lobby—Google's bitter opponent in the ongoing Net Neutrality debates. So, while YouTube may be the creative child of Silicon Valley, it is also, as much, the offspring of Bell lobbying power.

Back in the early 1990s, when the "information highway" was the talk of the town, Hollywood and the recording industry worked hard to make Internet companies responsible for any and all copyright infringement that happened via the Internet. Jack Valenti, Hollywood's chief lobbyist, warned that without congressional action, "the information superhighway … will collapse the great wonder of intellectual property." The recording industry, for its part, dispatched Johnny Cash to rhetorically link Internet piracy and, yes, a "ring of fire."

[Heh. I remember that debate. I could never wrap my mind around it, because the Sony VHS decision MADE those Hollywood folks, but schizophrenic law that can't be consistently applied is really nothing more than protectionism. Basically, I figure Hollywood will lobby for anything that appears to protect its interests, even if there's no way the law can be consistently applied without more protectionist exemptions and loopholes.

That would be the point: make laws that only protect me, and only persecute those I don't like, even if we are both engaged in identical behavior.

The biggest irony in all the copyright debate, I think, goes back to a decision made by Marc Andreessen with Mosaic: for a graphic to display on a browser, a copyright violation MUST take place as that image is copied to the machine with the browser. That is the illusion of browsers: that you aren't stealing because it doesn't LOOK like you're taking something that isn't yours. Browsers hide the invisible FTP thingie behind http.

Just like magic! You'll notice that at no time do my hands leave my arms!]

[...]

Had that view prevailed, there would probably be no YouTube today, and also no free blog sites, and maybe not even Google or Web 2.0. What venture capitalist would invest in a company already on the hook for everything its users might do? But, in one of the lesser-known turning points in Internet history, Hollywood never got its law. Its unstoppable lobbyists ran into an unmovable object: the Bell companies, who own those "tubes" over which the Internet runs. In the mid-1990s, fearing a future of liability, the Bells ordered their lobbyists to fight Hollywood's reforms, leading to one of the greatest political struggles in copyright history. (This paper provides a history of this and other struggles.)

Hollywood employs legendary lobbyists, like Jack Valenti, but when they ran into the Bells, it was like Frazier meeting Foreman. The Bells quickly put holds on all the legislation the content industries wanted. Telecom lobbyists like Roy Neel, a close friend of Al Gore (and later Howard Dean's campaign manager), went to Congress and began saying things like, the "copyright law threatens to put a damper on the expression of ideas on the Internet."

Facing stalemate, in 1997 the industries settled on a compromise: something called the Online Copyright Liability Limitation Act, which became Title II of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998 (§512 of the Copyright Code). It is this law that makes YouTube worth paying more than what you pay for its videos. And its long-term effects have been enormous—you might call §512 the Magna Carta for Web 2.0.

Why? Section 512(c) of the law applies to "Information Residing on Systems or Networks At Direction of Users." In 1998, that meant Geocities and AOL user pages. But in 2006, that means Blogger, Wikipedia, Flickr, Facebook, MySpace, and, yes, YouTube—all the companies whose shtick is "user-generated content."

Thanks to the Bells, all these companies are now protected by a "notice and take down" system when they host user content. That means that if Jon Stewart notices an infringing copy of The Daily Show on YouTube, Comedy Central can write a letter to YouTube and demand it be taken down. Then, so long as YouTube acts "expeditiously" and so long as YouTube wasn't already aware that the material was there, YouTube is in the clear. In legal jargon, YouTube is in a "safe harbor." Earlier this week, when YouTube took down 30,000 files after requests from a Japanese authors' group, that was §512(c) in action.

[...]

Stated otherwise, much of the copyrighted material on YouTube is in a legal category that is new to our age. It's not "fair use," the famous right to use works despite technical infringement, for reasons of public policy. Instead, it's in the growing category of "tolerated use"—use that is technically illegal, but tolerated by the owner because he wants the publicity. If that sounds as weird as "don't ask, don't tell," you're getting the idea. The industry is deeply conflicted about mild forms of piracy—trapped somewhere between its pathological hatred of "pirates" and its lust for the buzz piracy can build.

[This is the concept the NYTimes for some reason couldn't grasp in creating its locked stable of Times Select columnists. Some of my favorite columnists ever, but I refuse to read them now. Why? Because the Times chose to limit the influence of those influential voices, by removing them from the public sphere.

The Times chose financial reward over significant public influence (and abdicated any real effort to use those columnists to contribute to the national conversation on behalf of the public good). The Times didn't just act to jeopardize its own private interests. It also deprived the Commons of those columnists' ideas in the sense of a Jeffersonian "free exchange of ideas." To my mind, that means the Times is basically saying, "Screw the quality of national debate. We have no interest in contributing to the larger public good." I should note that official Times editorials are still freely available for all. The public presence of the monolithic Times "Editorial We" is probably how it rationalizes the TimesSelect abdication of public responsibility.]

But what about Mark Cuban's copyright argument? Why isn't YouTube in trouble in the same way Napster and Grokster were? The first difference, as indicated, is that Napster simply wasn't covered by the §512 safe-harbor law, and YouTube is. Napster wasn't "hosting" information at the direction of its users, but rather providing a tool for users to find and download predominantly infringing content. It may sound odd that Napster gets in more trouble for helping you find illegal stuff than YouTube does for actually hosting it. But that's the law and why YouTube should really, really thank its friends at Bell.

[Now this part appears to me to be a big pile of crap. Nothing against Tim Wu. I mean the argument distinguishing YouTube and Napster, because of hosting vs. directing. There's something more afoot here.

Ultimately FTP was the first real file-sharing program. Nobody wanted to go after FTP. Back in the BBS days of the dial-up walled garden Net (remember Pine?!), I knew entire BBS's devoted to trading photos, which were then zapped out to floppies that had to be hand-carried around. This was about 1990, when I observed this. I had a bunch of students who taught me how to find the BBS's. So much is made of Internet porn and naughty chat rooms now, but there was an entire network of those spaces in BBS land, far from the searching eyes of Archie and gopher. They worked out their hook-ups with a private BBS dialer, then used FTP for trades.

Napster was attacked legally because of its success, not because of its central architecture. Gnutella was just a semantic work-around because the legal heads wanted to make the central direction point (for non-hosted material) the deciding factor. To my mind, the common carrier argument should have been harped on to the wall with Napster.

I mean, can you imagine how the phone companies would scream if they were held accountable because copyrighted Musak fed over your phone line while you were put on hold, and you could make copies of it?

Or if phone companies and beeper companies could be held legally accountable because drug dealers use telephones to make their drug deals?!

I never could see why the FILE-sharing aspect of Napster was not the deciding factor in making good law. Instead, the Napster decision had no consistency, because it only applied to a company doing X on every second Tuesday while hopping on one foot, if wearing green shoes. I can't STAND inconsistent law that is not broadly applicable.]

There may also be deeper differences. If the Internet were not a bookstore, or tubes, but rather a red-light district, YouTube would best be imagined as the hotel, and Napster, well, the pimp. YouTube, like a hotel, provides space for people to do things, legal or not. It's not doing anything illegal itself, but its visitors may be. But Napster, everyone more or less now admits, was cast as the pimp: It was mainly a means of getting illegal stuff. Right or wrong, we seem to accept the benign vision of YouTube as an entity which, unlike Napster, was basically born as a place to showcase stupid human tricks.

[This is my favorite paragraph in the whole story. Attack of the Metaphors!

Or as my witty friend in upstate NY used to put as his email sig:

May the metaphors be with you.

No really, I'm loving the hotel metaphor. The truth is, Internet law could not exist without metaphors, but we run into trouble when many metaphors apply at the same time. What to do, what to do? I've already shown my bias. I like law that looks at the FUNCTION of what is happening, and applies itself consistently across all different instances of that function. I'm making a MEANS argument.

What this article seems to indicate is that Internet law primarily uses an ENDS argument, with 800-pound gorillas as primary (and perhaps corrupt?) influencers of which ends shall be rewarded, which ends shall be punished. Napster was punished because it created a very successful end point that the powerful music industry didn't like. FTP has never been punished even tho it accomplishes similar functions as any other common carrier, because it was never so wildly successful as to threaten any deeply entrenched interests who demanded protectionist law.

And as it says above, YouTube seems to have a "Get Out of Jail Free" card, simply because it isn't bit-torrenting entire feature-length films that threaten entrenched interests. There's something to be said about flying under the radar, but it wouldn't be necessary if the law were actually consistent, and not applied in a biased fashion.]

 

Happy Mole Day Yesterday!

It's after 6:02 pm on 10-23-06! What did YOU do to celebrate National Mole Day?!

I got fired up on it this year by the odd coincidence that I even noticed National Mole Day. A week earlier, I'd been talking with a colleague at work about how difficult I found chemistry to be, which was why I didn't pursue it beyond that one required class in high school.

My friend said she'd liked chemistry in high school, and did all right in it. I said the equations were what made me just crazy. She said, "Oh, I found those equations easier than math equations."

I said, "The moles were the worst part! I never could wrap my head around all that." (remembering my mediocre grade as well) She looked at me, puzzled, like she didn't know what I was talking about. "What's a mole?" she says.

OK, so what's wrong with this picture? Here's somebody who excelled school, who did well in chemistry, and 20 years later, doesn't even remember that the equations HINGED COMPLETELY around moles. And I performed poorly in chemistry, but I remember greatly my humiliation at not being able to master equations with moles (and it's more than 25 years later, for me).

Maybe it goes back to my dyslexia. I couldn't just learn something, or do some equation assignment the teacher gave us, without being able to visualize it and know why I was doing it. It REALLY made me crazy. I couldn't figure out why we cared about moles, why mole equations worked the way they did, and MOST of all, there were WAY TOO MANY NUMBERS to ever visualize in my mind's eye, which was the only way I really did anything. I am perfectly capable of performing abstract tasks, but I need to be able to visualize what I'm doing. And I needed a larger context in which to place it, just to be able to understand the task at all. I bailed in frustration long before I ever got to that point.

Now if they had done something so clever as to pin it to a date, like 10-23 for a mole is 6.02 times ten to the 23rd, I'd probably have done better, you think? Probably not.

               

Cool Women, Cool Video

Link: YouTube - WVWV - Dreams PSA.

Wake up and vote for your future in November.

I got this bit below off the National Women's Law Center. But click on the button on the left to look at the group that's producing videos like the one above.

Chris

Why Women Should Vote

We know there is never enough time to do what you HAVE to do each day, much less to learn more about the issues that concern you. As a result, many women, especially unmarried women, do not vote in national elections and make their voices heard in our democracy. Yet our government is making decisions every day that affect women's lives, and our leaders' priorities often don't match ours.

When you cast your ballot, you want to be informed. Sure there is a lot of information out there, but how do you know who to believe? The National Women's Law Center (NWLC) and Women's Voices. Women Vote (WVWV) have joined forces to provide you with basic information on the issues you care about. Here you will find a series of short summaries outlining why it's important for women to register and vote - addressing issues like access to health care and education, equal pay and job opportunities, and protecting Social Security.

Check out these materials, and share them with your friends, families, co-workers and neighbors. Then make sure you go to the polls on Election Day!

You can also click here for information on voting (your polling place, how to vote absentee, etc.) or to learn about the candidates in your area.

NWLC is a non-profit, nonpartisan organization that has been working to advance and protect women’s legal rights since 1972.  WVWV is a non-profit, nonpartisan organization that seeks to mobilize women to register to vote and to go to the polls on Election Day. Neither organization takes positions on candidates or elections, and nothing herein should be construed as an endorsement of any candidate or party.

© 2000-2006 National Women's Law Center

Women banned from swimming at Somalia Beach

Once again, I've been transported back into Margaret Atwood's "A Handmaid's Tale." I know repression around the world is too common to actually remark upon, except that I can't help the outrage, ever. And the feeling that when this kind of second-class status is institutionalized in one place it can more easily be institutionalized somewhere else.

And for those who have a bent toward this line of thinking, about how women should not be swimming among men on a beach, they get righteous reinforcement, which gives them greater force and backup for the next outrage and oppression they have in mind.

The very idea, that women should be banned from a beach. That their horizons cannot include the wider horizons of staring into the sea, the peace of being buoyed by it, the relaxation of a day in the sun and surf. How easy it is for those with power to decide that those without power should not be able to enjoy such things.

Link: My Way News - Somalia Bans Swimming for Women at Beach.

Somalia Bans Swimming for Women at Beach

Oct 20,  1:27 PM (ET)

Sheikh Farah Ali Hussein, chair of a northern Mogadishu Islamic court, said Friday that the ban applies only to the northern Mogadishu Leedo beach, where families usually go on weekends to play and relax.

"We stopped women from swimming because it is against the teaching of Islam for women to mingle with men, especially while they are swimming," Hussein said.

Since sweeping to power over much of southern Somalia in June, the Islamists have banned movie viewing, publicly lashed drug users and broke up a wedding celebration because a band was playing and women and men were socializing together. They also have introduced public executions.

Somali women usually swim fully clothed as swimsuits are generally frowned upon. Somali men, however, swim in trunks, at times bare-chested or wearing vests.

"They cannot prevent us from our right to swim in the sea. What is wrong with us enjoying ourselves like men? That is clear discrimination," Miriam Isse told The Associated Press as she watched others swimming in the Indian Ocean.

[...]

Great Blog: "Back in Skinny Jeans"

Typepad is highlighting this blog by someone named "Stephanie," [Stephanie Quilao, thanks for dropping by, Stephanie!]  so I popped in to take a look, and I just think this site is TERRIFIC! One post after the other, I started reading back in the archives, going "yes, yes, yes."

I gave my niece a subscription to that "New Moon" magazine just last Christmas. So besides having a vulcan mind meld with "Stephanie," I just love her eclectic mix on a subject that is near and dear to my heart: the media manipulation of women's body images and self esteem.

I feel this even more so since I was dealing with the death of a dear friend earlier this year, a feminist and activist, but also a doctor with her own health issues because of a bad gastric bypass operation. I've had many arguments lately with a male friend who seems utterly oblivious to the fact that women's body image problems are a CRUCIAL feminist issue.

Which is so amazingly illustrated in the Dove video from YouTube, which I include here below, as seen also on the Skinny Jeans site.

Would you even recognize this woman, if she were standing on the street, next to her billboard? It just hits me like a fist to the gut. Women are going around feeling inadequate because they are being compared to women who don't even exist. Even the model for this ad (who really doesn't look like anything special to me) would feel ugly next to her own falsified image.

Oh dear, I've been bitten...

By the Battlestar Galactica bug!

Click on the link or the image below to watch a hilarious and cheesy video. I figure it's a fannish video that the show adopted as its own.

Link: SCIFI.COM | Battlestar Galactica: A New Crew In Town video... "so much better than the one with Lorne Greene."

And then there's Starbuck as well (see the blonde above). I LOVE the new Starbuck, but she needs to cut her hair again soon and quit playing mommy. The tough Starbuck is the one that makes my socks roll up and down. Starbuck as Xena?

But I know I'm a day late in jumping in on this show. I watched the VERY daring season opener the other day (no spoilers here, but you need to catch it!), and I saw something I haven't seen since watching Xena: a willingness to take risks because the show hides in the netherlands of deep-numbered cable. The margins of the margins.

And I didn't get on board with Xena until some of the incredible things I saw in Season Two as well.

It doesn't hurt, I guess, that Lucy Lawless is also on this show. A bit of a beacon, a bellwether, to show the way. I sure hope the former president (Mary McDonald) isn't dead, however.

Elephants: A great big canary in the coal mine?

Link: An Elephant Crackup? - New York Times.

It appears that wild elephants around the world are going ballistic, worse than the attack of "must" written about in George Orwell's classic "Shooting an Elephant."

I can't read the New York Times story below without thinking once more of Orwell's prescience, and how much the story, this time of wild, not tame, elephants, echos Orwell's symbolic warning of the dangers of a slowly dying but deeply exploitive Empire, the British Empire as the slowly dying elephant.

The article cites stress and habitat reduction as possible causes for elephant craziness (male elephants raping rhinos?!), but these are large and highly sensitive mammals who, like whales, communicate by subaudible sounds (to humans) over long distances. I'm wondering if some of the stress on the elephants might not also be from the air-transmitted equivalent of Navy sonar on whales, sounds we don't hear that mess with the elephants' finely-tuned hearing. You know, like what would happen to you if you had a stuck and constantly buzzing doorbell in your home.

But mainly I just wanted an excuse to quote two of my favorite passages from "Shooting an Elephant." This essay is just too profound for words to explain.

"Shooting an Elephant," by George Orwell

[...]

For at that time I had already made up my mind that imperialism was an evil thing and the sooner I chucked up my job and got out of it the better. Theoretically, and secretly, of course, I was all for the Burmese and all against their oppressors, the British. As for the job I was doing, I hated it more bitterly than I can perhaps make clear. In a job like that you see the dirty work of Empire at close quarters. The wretched prisoners huddling in the stinking cages of the lock-ups, the grey, cowed faces of the long-term convicts, the scarred buttocks of the men who had been Bogged with bamboos, all these oppressed me with an intolerable sense of guilt. But I could get nothing into perspective. I was young and ill-educated and I had had to think out my problems in the utter silence that is imposed on every Englishman in the East. I did not even know that the British Empire is dying, still less did I know that it is a great deal better than the younger empires that are going to supplant it. All I knew was that I was stuck between my hatred of the empire I served and my rage against the evil-spirited little beasts who tried to make my job impossible. With one part of my mind I thought of the British Raj as an unbreakable tyranny, as something clamped down, in saecula saeculorum, upon the will of prostrate peoples; with another part I thought that the greatest joy in the world would be to drive a bayonet into a Buddhist priest's guts. Feelings like these are the normal by-products of imperialism; ask any Anglo-Indian official, if you can catch him off duty.

[...]

In that instant, in too short a time, one would have thought, even for the bullet to get there, a mysterious, terrible change had come over the elephant. He neither stirred nor fell, but every line of his body had altered. He looked suddenly stricken, shrunken, immensely old, as though the frightful impact of the bullet had paralysed him without knocking him down. At last, after what seemed a long time, it might have been five seconds, I dare say, he sagged flabbily to his knees. His mouth slobbered. An enormous senility seemed to have settled upon him. One could have imagined him thousands of years old. I fired again into the same spot. At the second shot he did not collapse but climbed with desperate slowness to his feet and stood weakly upright, with legs sagging and head drooping. I fired a third time. That was the shot that did for him. You could see the agony of it jolt his whole body and knock the last remnant of strength from his legs. But in falling he seemed for a moment to rise, for as his hind legs collapsed beneath him he seemed to tower upward like a huge rock toppling, his trunk reaching skyward like a tree. He trumpeted, for the first and only time. And then down he came, his belly towards me, with a crash that seemed to shake the ground even where I lay.

[...]

I have to add one godawful Orwell quotation at the end of the Times excerpts. I don't know why I have to, because the Charles Siebert piece is excellent and very well-written, and it moves me greatly. But it just seemed appropriate to give Orwell the last word.

Link: An Elephant Crackup? - New York Times.

An Elephant Crackup?

By CHARLES SIEBERT

Published: October 8, 2006

[...]

All across Africa, India and parts of Southeast Asia, from within and around whatever patches and corridors of their natural habitat remain, elephants have been striking out, destroying villages and crops, attacking and killing human beings. In fact, these attacks have become so commonplace that a whole new statistical category, known as Human-Elephant Conflict, or H.E.C., was created by elephant researchers in the mid-1990’s to monitor the problem. In the Indian state Jharkhand near the western border of Bangladesh, 300 people were killed by elephants between 2000 and 2004. In the past 12 years, elephants have killed 605 people in Assam, a state in northeastern India, 239 of them since 2001; 265 elephants have died in that same period, the majority of them as a result of retaliation by angry villagers, who have used everything from poison-tipped arrows to laced food to exact their revenge. In Africa, reports of human-elephant conflicts appear almost daily, from Zambia to Tanzania, from Uganda to Sierra Leone, where 300 villagers evacuated their homes last year because of unprovoked elephant attacks.

Still, it is not only the increasing number of these incidents that is causing alarm but also the singular perversity — for want of a less anthropocentric term — of recent elephant aggression. Since the early 1990’s, for example, young male elephants in Pilanesberg National Park and the Hluhluwe-Umfolozi Game Reserve in South Africa have been raping and killing rhinoceroses; this abnormal behavior, according to a 2001 study in the journal Pachyderm, has been reported in “a number of reserves” in the region. In July of last year, officials in Pilanesberg shot three young male elephants who were responsible for the killings of 63 rhinos, as well as attacks on people in safari vehicles. In Addo Elephant National Park, also in South Africa, up to 90 percent of male elephant deaths are now attributable to other male elephants, compared with a rate of 6 percent in more stable elephant communities.

In a coming book on this phenomenon, Gay Bradshaw, a psychologist at the environmental-sciences program at Oregon State University, notes that in India, where the elephant has long been regarded as a deity, a recent headline in a leading newspaper warned, “To Avoid Confrontation, Don’t Worship Elephants.” “Everybody pretty much agrees that the relationship between elephants and people has dramatically changed,” Bradshaw told me recently. “What we are seeing today is extraordinary. Where for centuries humans and elephants lived in relative peaceful coexistence, there is now hostility and violence. Now, I use the term ‘violence’ because of the intentionality associated with it, both in the aggression of humans and, at times, the recently observed behavior of elephants.”

Google Video fails to "get traction," so Google goes after YouTube

There is one paragraph from the New York Times story below that jumped out at me, for its complete and total irony. I'll make it bold, and see what you think. I've also got a few snarky interpretive comments below.

Link: Google Is Said to Set Sights on YouTube - New York Times.

Google Is Said to Set Sights on YouTube

By ANDREW ROSS SORKIN  and PETER EDMONSTON

Published: October 7, 2006

[...]

Google is in discussions to acquire YouTube for $1.6 billion, people involved in the talks said yesterday. While the talks are in the early stages, and may fall apart, the size of Google’s offer may push YouTube closer to a deal. Other companies have also expressed interest and could swoop in with a higher offer.

Microsoft,  Yahoo,  Viacom and the  News Corporation, among others, have all visited YouTube’s headquarters in San Mateo, Calif., in recent months to inquire about buying the company.

[...]

A deal for YouTube would be the crowning moment for a property that emerged as a cultural phenomenon almost immediately after it officially began last December. Its site, which delivers more than 100 million video clips a day, allows users to share a broad array of offerings from news clips to home movies to spoofs — sometimes funny but often simply crude — created by ordinary users.

Almost single-handedly, YouTube has both popularized the sharing of videos and empowered would-be movie makers around the world. The site is also facing possible legal challenges over the unauthorized posting and sharing of videos. Yet a number of media companies would prefer to embrace YouTube as a partner, rather than treat it as a pariah, as was the case with Napster.

[...]

The $1.6 billion price tag, while seemingly rich for so young a company, makes sense, research analysts said.

“That’s expensive but not unreasonable,” said Charlene Li, an analyst with  Forrester Research. Ms. Li estimated that the company has about 50 million users worldwide, which works out to a purchase price of about $32 a user.

The deal would make sense from the perspective of both companies, Ms. Li and others said.

“Google Video has not gotten any traction,” Ms. Li said.

Despite Google’s broad reach as an Internet search service and its well-known brand name, Google Video has only a 10 percent market share, according to Hitwise, which monitors Web traffic. YouTube has a 46 percent share, and MySpace has 23 percent.

“YouTube figured out what Google and Yahoo and Microsoft and all the others in the marketplace didn’t,” she said. “It’s not about the video. It’s about creating a community around the video.

[...]

Gee, what was their first clue? You know, I suspect the odds are right up there with the chances of a camel passing through the eye of a needle, for big 900-pound gorilla companies to be able to magically "create" communities with a wave of their well-funded magic wands. This also reinforces what I discovered in my dissertation community ethnography.

But for all the talk about creating communities, I think there is one traditional marketing angle that YouTube has that other companies are overlooking. The service isn't just viral (in that you can post the code and run the Flash-swapped video on your site, something most web site owners admittedly DON'T want, to the point of complaining of people taking their deep-linked image code and server load time and punting it for free on another site): it also is remarkably branded.

I'm referring to the YouTube brand in the corner of every punted video. For ANY online viral video service to compete, it has to have a way to brand the video on every site it appears on, like that YouTube watermark in the right corner, and the distinctive large centered play button.

Sure, anybody can watermark anything, and there's nothing really brilliant about the YouTube interface design (if anything, Flickr is a far better-designed social media sharing service. YouTube link placements drive me crazy). Which just goes to show you, interface design has very little to do with YouTube's success. Should I be depressed about this, as a designer, or should I be happy that communities trump design? I did learn this truth definitively in my dissertation, after all.

So if you have "Google Video" watermarked in a corner or whatever, is that just as good as the YouTube watermark? No. By the power of repetition, the YouTube watermark doesn't just brand the video, it communicates a message, over and over again, a message of revolt against traditional media, traditional television video providers and producers. It says "This is about YOU." It says "This is YOUR Tube."

Now, Napster was just a word that made me want to take a nap, so I'm not saying this is a be-all and end-all factor.

But I still think the communicative message of the YouTube brand and watermark make it a tough standard for any competitor to fight. Better interface design, better features, even a 900-pound gorilla like Google can't fight it.

It has a first-mover advantage, a thriving community, and a brand that makes each and every user want to thump his or her chest and say "This is MY Tube!