DISQUS

Mashable - The Social Media Guide: 2007/05/25/youtube-car-crash/

  • chris · 2 years ago
    I hope there is a law that prevents such lawsuits. What does NJ Turnpike authority want the money for to build roads, they will be wasting a lot of tax payers money in a lawsuit they won't win.
  • Jacob Levy · 2 years ago
    The NJ authority is a public body representing all citizens. I can't believe they have some right to make profit from anything they do, including the videos captured by their spycams. This sounds like a totally frivolous lawsuit to me.
  • Dan · 2 years ago
    I'm with Jacob. As a gov't entity, all documents (including videos) are Public Domain--unless "Classified" or otherwise protected under national security concerns... This, obviously, is not.
  • Ali · 2 years ago
    They shuold rename it to SueTube.
  • John · 2 years ago
    The only reason I could see is if the family of the victim didn't want it up there, but even then you can't really tell who was driving / who the victim is.
  • Smiley · 2 years ago
    Yea sure I agree with Ali, they should rename youtube to suetube so that everybody could sue them for any stupid unreasonable reasons.
  • John Bickerton · 2 years ago
    The reason NJTA wants it removed doesn't have to do with money. It has to do with the fact that a death occurred and the video was not meant to be viewed for people's "entertainment". There's not much difference watching this video than watching a snuff film.

    Is the video of the state putting to death a felon by electrocution in the public domain?

    Come on people, if that was your father in that crash, would you like the fact that hundreds/thousands of strangers were mindlessly watching the footage? Maybe we should rename YouTube - "VoyeurTube".

    Whether this lawsuit will fly is another question, especially since YouTube removed the video when asked. I think it points towards the fact that YouTube is being asked, through all of these suits, to take more responsibility for the content that gets uploaded.
  • nick · 2 years ago
    I agree with John that this is about the family's concerns and not copyright infringement, but that doesn't mean the video itself isn't in the public domain. There's lots of stuff that people would prefer wasn't online. Yet, it's important that copyright only be invoked when appropriate. Since this is a gov agency making the video, it is presumably public domain and thus they have no copyright claim over its display/distribution. In the past, perhaps journalistic discretion might have kept the video out of the public eye. It's safe to say, however, that discretion is pretty much nonexistent these days online. If they really don't want these kinds of videos showing up on YouTube and other sites, they'd be better served to supervise their employees and hold them responsible for videos that make it out into the wild.
  • kevin · 1 year ago
    Stupid fucking people that get a kick out of watching these videos!