The fight is on: The 100 million videos on YouTube are being looked at for copyright violations.

This debate will hammer out the fair use policy, which even in print has no hard rules, in film. The print consensus is that you can quote sentences and paragraphs from articles and books, but that you cannot reprint substantial portions of entire pieces. A blurry line indeed, but by and large it works.

When it comes to videos, I would argue a similar policy should hold. Entire segments — like those often seen on YouTube — should be off-limits without permission from the owners. There is no point in subscribing to cable if all the best clips are free online anyway. In contrast, brief excerpts posted to make a given point should be fair game.

There are indications that the Web site and the networks can work out an agreement, especially considering that a popular YouTube segment essentially promotes the program the clip came from. A Time Warner executive is quoted in the article as saying, “We’d like to have our content displayed on these platforms, but on a basis that it respects our rights as the owner of that content.”

Robert VerBruggen blogs at http://robertsrationale.blogspot.com.

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