Quote:
Originally Posted by RawAlex
Sorry, but I have to disagree. If we were talking about 2257 circa 1995 or so, you might have something. Even then, it is questionable.
xtube changes the format of the videos. The add their trailer / logo onto the videos. They sort them by type, content, name, etc. They publish them on webpages that they alone control (the submitters do not control the pages that their content appears on).
From where I sit, Xtube received, encodes, repackages and redistributes the videos on their website. Sourcing the videos from a content supplier or from the general public to build a website doesn't change the nature of the game. "hosting" and hosting alone wouldn't involve things like re-encoding, managing, listing, indexing, insertion on page, etc.
At minimum, they are a secondary producer, and with absense of contact information for the individual posters, they could be the defacto primary producer (because no other information is provided).
It is a very, very long stretch to say that xtube is nothing more than a filehost, doubly so because the line between the "content for sale" and the "user submitted content" is blurred by the format of the site.
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There might be a problem with the fact that they have selected and submitted content, I agree with that... Still, user submitted sites do NOT redistribute even if they reencode the content to publish it. They do NOT select it... the 2257 regs clearly state in 2 (h) (B) (v) if you only "[transmit, store, retreive, host, FORMAT or TRANSLATE]" a communication and do not SELECT or ALTER the content then you are not a producer... If they actually watermark each video, it might be altering it, not sure if thats enough though...
But simply reencoding it into another format is not enough to be a producer.
The main 2257 issue they might face is, I agree with that, the fact that they have actual selected and user submitted content mixed up in one site...