[cma-l] Fwd: Re: [YouTube Help] Ofcom to start charging charities and organisations £2900 for use of Video on Demand service???

[London Chinese Radio]

Hi,

I am a bit confused by this all, even to the extent that people are taking
it seriously.
As one person commented; "has the Silly Season arrived early"?

I posted it onto the YouTube help forum, because I wanted to see what people
there thought. I only got one reply so far, so am reposting it here.
But as far as I can see, Ofcom cannot just start charging people like this.
It's completely insane.



---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Google Help <noreply at google.com>
Date: Tue, Jul 6, 2010 at 6:59 PM
Subject: Re: [YouTube Help] Ofcom to start charging charities and
organisations £2900 for use of Video on Demand service???
To: londonhuayu at gmail.com


rewboss has posted an answer to the question "Ofcom to start charging
charities and organisations £2900 for use of Video on Demand service???":

Hmm. I guess that this would apply to YouTube as the host, not to individual
channel owners, so YouTube is the organisation that would have to pay.

Looking at the various criteria, as explained in section 2.3:

Does it include TV-like programmes? The guidance says that it should
primarily be long-form shows of the type that you see on TV, although some
short-form videos (like music videos) might also be considered TV-like. The
real question is, is it competing for the same audience as TV?
Unfortunately, words like "principal purpose" are very vague. YouTube has a
lot of music videos and TV shows, but most are illegal and taken down when
YouTube is notified of them; YouTube's "principal purpose", you could argue,
is as a platform for sharing home videos and networking. Vlogs are not
"TV-like content".

Is it VOD? Yes.

Is there editorial responsibility? A very straightforward answer to this --
it's in section 2.17: "An example of such a service, with no-one exercising
editorial responsibility, might be a catalogue of programmes consisting of
user-generated content posted to a public website for sharing and exchange,
without prior moderation or restriction as to what can be posted." That
pretty much sums up YouTube: yes, there are rules, but only in compliance
with laws and certain standards of decency. So YouTube seems to escape the
Act thanks to this clause.

Is it made available to the public? Yes.

Further on, there's a list of types of site that may or may not be affected.
Among that may not, 3.3.a) mentions content posted by private individuals...
etc.

So basically, I think that YouTube may have nothing to worry about here.


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