What the Veoh Decision Means for YouTube and Others

Nice post this morning tracing out the implications of a recent California district court decision on a case in which internet video site Veoh was sued by a porn company for hosting material that infringed on that company's copyrights:

http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/08/28/what-the-veoh-decision-means-for-youtube-and-others/

In a nutshell, Veoh received DMCA notices from IO Company, the purveyor of porn, and complied with them, but ended up in court anyway. IO Company was arguing that Veoh, by automatically transcoding user-uploaded videos into Flash video format, had taken over control of the content and thus enjoyed no safe-harbor provisions under the existing laws. The court disagreed.

Obviously this is a very promising sign for YouTube, which is still fighting it out with Viacom over what the latter claims to be a $1 billion copyright infringement. There are many appeals still to come, and with this much money on the table, sooner or later the Supreme Court will be asked to weigh in on the issue. But even beyond the arena of internet video, this was a case which could have had a tremendously chilling effect on all community-oriented sites. Among other things, IO Company was arguing that providers should:

1. Individually inspect every piece of uploaded content and verify that it was not in violation of copyright, regardless of whether the holder of the copyright had contacted them with a complaint. Presumably the provider would be using some sort of magic copyright database by which to identify all such cases of infringement.
2. Ban the IP of all infringers, even if that would have the side-effect of banning a bunch of innocent members as well.

Now, it's obvious that IO Company was just looking for some free money in this case. But the consequences of them winning on such an argument would have been tremendously negative. If every site was held liable for every action of its users, even if it made a good-faith effort to keep things on the up-and-up, then any business with a website that allows community interaction would operate within a precarious legal landscape.

So, it's not a total win, but it's a step in the direction of sanity, and that's a good thing.

Websites as Socially-Constructed Space

An interesting article today on "A List Apart," on how cartography can inform website information design:

The conception of web designer as information architect depends upon a vision of cyberspace not unlike the vision of physical space held by René Descartes (1596-1650). To him, and to most of Western civilization for hundreds of years, space was a void, a preexisting grid which remains empty until points are identified and paths plotted upon it. (Think of the digital plains depicted in the movie Tron.)

In the 1970s, however, Henri Lefebvre’s work The Production of Space turned this view on its head, arguing that space is produced through the enactment of social relations. Space, according to Lefebvre, is created by the flows and movements of relational networks—such as capital, power, and information—in, across, and through a given physical area. A building, in Lefebvre’s reading, is a map of the interactions of the people who inhabit it; an architect is not a builder in an otherwise empty wilderness, but an observer, chronicler, and shaper of the networks that exist around her—in short, a map maker. Websites informed by a Lefebvrian conception of cyberspace rather than a Cartesian one would provide truly user-centered design, by recognizing that it is the users themselves whose actions produce the website; the web designer merely facilitates that creation.

The author -- Aaron Rester -- uses this insight to draw a very practical conclusion for website design, both at initial launch and during the period of ongoing maintenance:

Instead of imposing an architecture upon users from above, we should use the flow of their interactions with the site and with each other to determine the form of this memory map.

It's a good point. If we take our audience seriously, we need to closely observe not just what information they are accessing and sharing, but the paths they are taking in doing so. That information should then feed back into the site's relaunch or redesign, in order to shorten paths and empower users by making their site actions quicker and more effective.

An example: a site I recently worked on has, as one of its primary missions, the goal of assisting visitors with problems they've encountered in using the company's product. The site includes both user forums and an FAQ section that contains how-to content. From the beginning we were aware of a possible split in our audience into two similar streams: those who come to our site to look for troubleshooting documents, and those who head to the forums to ask other people for help. Inspired by the article above, I now see possibilities for uniting those streams. Why not build the FAQ page so it's easy to get from there to highly-rated forum posts? Why not build out the forums so that FAQ content is linked persistently somewhere on the page? How about setting up the FAQ content along a wiki model, so that users can expand it and improve it?

Of course, these ideas are based on my presuppositions about the way visitors will travel through the site, and that's presumptuous of me. To fully embrace the cartography model, you would have to look at actual traffic and bring site analytics to bear. Once the site is launched and people are coming online with their questions, where do they go first? Once they come into contact with actionable information, what do they do with it and where do they go? Are there long paths that can become short, or short paths that miss important steps?

Then there's the brave new world: actually allowing users to recreate your site architecture. In a sense, wikis already allow this, in that visitors can create any link they want pretty much anywhere they want. And you also get a small measure of this feature in automated widgets that note the most popular links (and thereby make them more popular still). But what would a site look like, and how would it have to operate, if its information architecture were truly fluid?

Morning Musings

A few things I came across in my morning browse:

First, there's the news that Adobe is refining its web and mobile strategy. I remember the days when Photoshop was like that cheerleader in high school: enticing, even intoxicating, but ultimately out of my reach. I loved the power and the features, but I never needed them enough to pay upwards of $600. Now, though, with Photoshop Express, I feel like I can finally hang out with the cool kids. Adobe has been a reluctant convert to the idea of web services, but they are finally (painfully?) making the move, and they're making some good decisions. "Automatically sync photos from desktop to Web to phone and back again"? Amen, brother -- that's added value, and along the way they're likely to enjoy the community love that comes when editing your photos, uploading them, and sharing them with friends are all part of the same, seamless process.

Contrast that with Microsoft, which is still shuffling its feet by the side of the pool, worrying that the web services water will prove too cold. Office Live never made a lick of sense as a branding concept unless it was an online version of the Office suite of products, and it's still not there. Touted as a "feature" is the ability to upload Office documents and then download them for use within the Office products you already own. Cool ... except that it's not any more cool than any other online storage option (including the decidedly un-sexy but more convenient alternative of simply mailing your documents to yourself as an email attachment). Of course we all know that Microsoft is terrified that the web will cannibalize its software sales, but when Adobe by comparison looks like a forward-thinking, innovative company, you've got a problem.

Second, the social networking wars are in full force; Facebook announced that it passed the 100 million user mark on the same day that news came out that MySpace might work with Amazon (or Apple, or Rhapsody) on its revamped online music service. Music is really MySpace's killer app; Facebook has the worldwide numbers, while MySpace's growth is mostly flat, but in terms of sheer US users, MySpace is still king and the main reason is music. Bands have pages on MySpace, and streaming music is already distributed throughout the site. Facebook simply has nothing to compare in that space, and if MySpace can get music retailing right, it could provide a very healthy revenue stream for a very long time.