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future. YouTube actually offered to do something very like this: they invited Viacom and other rightsholders to send them all the clips they wanted kept offline, and promised to programatically detect these clips and interdict them. 
But Viacom rejected this offer. Rather, the company wants YouTube to just figure it out, determine a priori which video clips are being presented with permission and which ones are not. After all, Viacom does the very same thing: it won\'t air clips until a battalion of lawyers have investigated them and determined whether they are lawful. 
But the Internet is not cable television. Net-based hosting outfits -- including YouTube, Flickr, Blogger, Scribd, and the Internet Archive -- offer free publication venues to all comers, enabling anyone to publish anything. In 1998\'s Digital Millennium Copyright Act, Congress considered the question of liability for these companies and decided to offer them a mixed deal: hosting companies don\'t need to hire a million lawyers to review every blog-post before it goes live, but rightsholders can order them to remove any infringing material from the net just by sending them a notice that the material infringes. 
This deal enabled hosting companies to offer free platforms for publication and expression to everyone. But it also allowed anyone to censor the Internet, just by making claims of infringement, without offering any evidence to support those claims, without having to go to court to prove their claims (this has proven to be an attractive nuisance, presenting an irresistible lure to anyone with a beef against an online critic, from the Church of Scientology to Diebold\'s voting machines division). 
The proposal for online hosts to figure out what infringes and what doesn\'t is wildly impractical. Under most countries\' copyright laws, creative works receive a copyright from the moment that they are \"fixed in a tangible medium\" (hard drives count), and this means that the pool of copyrighted works is so large as to be practically speaking infinite. Knowing whether a work is copyrighted, who holds the copyright, and whether a posting is made with the rightsholder\'s permission (or in accord with each nation\'s varying ideas about fair use) is impossible. The only way to be sure is to start from the presumption that each creative work is infringing, and then make each Internet user prove, to some lawyer\'s satisfaction, that she has the right to post each drib of content that appears on the Web. 
Imagine that such a system were the law of the land. There\'s no way Blogger or YouTube or Flickr could afford to offer free hosting to their users. Rather, all these hosted services would have to charge enough for access to cover the scorching legal bills associated with checking all material. And not just the freebies, either: your local ISP, the servers hosting your company\'s website or your page for family genealogy: they\'d all have to do the same kind of continuous checking and re-checking of every file you publish with them. 
It would be the end of any publication that couldn\'t foot the legal bills to get off the ground. The multi-billion-page Internet would collapse into the homogeneous world of cable TV (remember when we thought that a \"500-channel universe\" would be unimaginably broad? Imagine an Internet with only 500 \"channels!\"). From Amazon to Ask A Ninja, from Blogger to The Everlasting Blort, every bit of online content is made possible by removing the cost of paying lawyers to act as the Internet\'s gatekeepers. 
This is great news for artists. The traditional artist\'s lament is that our publishers have us over a barrel, controlling the narrow and vital channels for making works available -- from big gallery owners to movie studios to record labels to New York publishers. That\'s why artists have such a hard time negotiating a decent deal for themselves (for example, most beginning recording artists have to agree to
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