A video of a story by CBS is storming the web and ignites dispute over the distribution of copyrighted material in video sharing web sites.
The movie is about an autistic high school student,Jason McElwain, who was assisting the coach of a basketball team and got a chance to play in the last game of the season. The rest is history. Watch the movie here. It’s a must-see.
The movie was posted on www.Youtube.com video sharing website and became one of their top viewed videos. CBS then demanded that Youtube remove the copyrighted movie. Youtube complied but its users uploaded it again. Youtube and other video sharing websites like metacafe.com need to resolve the problem of how to prevent users from loading copyrighted material even if the site decides to remove it.
My opinion is that in this particular case, because the movie is so popular and does not include any proprietary CBS material, CBS should release it's copyrights and release it to the public domain. After all it's a basketball game with some background information not an exclusive with Osama Bin-Laden. The PR gain for CBS will be enormous and the public will be more sympathetic to copyright issues and to CBS.
