Copyright laws (for internet avatars etc.)

That's totally not true.

Any use of a copyrighted image made without the copyright holder's permission is a violation of copyright, unless it falls under "fair use." Stealing a copyrighted image for an avatar in no way falls under "fair use", as that is intended for things like criticism of a literary work, discussion of a news event, and certain educational uses.

In reality, you are unlikely to get sued for a non-commercial use, but if you are asking if it is legal and ethical, the answer is no.

 

The people who make money off of their art, music, videos, photographs, stories, poetry, or other intellectual property.

Perhaps if you had spent time and money developing intellectual property that you were trying to sell and make a living on... and people like you said "copyright is bullshit, everything should be free" and just stole it... you might feel differently. There are a lot of struggling artists, filmmakers, writers, poets, musicians, and photographers who can't make a living any more because everyone's stealing their content instead of paying for it.

A lot of smaller companies have simply stopped producing films, music, or other content because they can no longer afford to continue to produce it because people take the attitude you take. The big companies can continue... for now. But at some point, if everyone wants everythign for free and no one is willing to pay for content, no one's going to produce new content.

 

Please don't make claims about copyright law if you don't understand it. Use of any intellectual property without the rightsholder's permission, with or without monetary gain, is copyright infringement. People can and do sue for infringement where the person or entity infringing is not deriving financial benefit. It doesn't happen a lot, but it certainly does, and certain types of infringements carry statutory fines (up to $25,000), whether or not any monetary benefit is derived.

Again, not true, except under a very limited and specific set of circumstances that define fair use. You cannot, for example, simply post a lengthy clip from a movie, say "fair use;; no infringement intended" and have that be the case, any more than you can go into a store, steal a DVD and say "I'm not planning to make profit off of it, so my stealing it is fine." In reality, Youtube is the largest facilitator of copyright infringement in the world (well, maybe next to Bittorrent), but only a small portion of those whose copyright is infringed do anything about it.

Actually, that's because they are enforcing the DMCA.

 

Please cite your source for this "fact." I've never seen any data that says anything remotely close to this, and, in fact, it's one of those statements that can pretty clearly be disproven on the face of it with the tiniest bit of research.

Additionally, though they aren't going bankrupt, the decrease in revenues has had an enormous impact on what sort of content the large media conglomerates are willing to produce. In large part due to piracy, they are a lot more conservative about the types of programming they are willing to produce, the budgets they are willing to advance to produce the content.

That means that we see more and more of the same old formulaic blockbusters and sitcoms and dramas (and reality TV, which costs almost nothing to produce) and a lot less of the edgy, experimental, risky programming (movies, TV, music, etc) because they have less confidence they will be able to recoup production costs. Unlike your statement above, the increasingly conservative view on programming approval is extremely well documented and can be found in nearly every interview with studio executives, as well as in industry trade stories and articles written by people who are trying to get new programming, music, artists, etc. approved for production.

Also, for the record, lawyers are not required to "force" Youtube to remove infringing content. It is easy for any rights holder to get Youtube (or any other Internet service provider) to remove infringing content by filling out a simple form, thanks to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, so there's virtually no cost to a takedown request, and, again thanks to the DMCA, the service provider must honor the request quickly, or else the provider becomes liable directly for the infringement.

 

I see no way in which the above comment proves your assertion that

Additionally, the piece you don't seem to get is, the owner of copyright on any content owns it and gets to decide how it is used. Disney, for example, releases DVDs of their most famous films for a limited time, and then pulls them from the market, and re-releases them again years later. By doing so, they've maintained a much higher value for their intellectual property.

You could argue that making an unavailable movie available on Youtube isn't harming anyone becuase it's not preventing one from being sold... but you'd be wrong, because that would degrade the long-term value of Disney's marketing strategy. And even if there is no demonstrable harm (which is arguable, as you'll see below), the bottom line is, if I own the rights to something *I*, not you or anyone else, get to decide how that content is used or if it's available at all. You don't get to upload it, show it, make it available, own it, or anything else unless I've granted those rights to you. It doesn't matter if you're making money off of it or not.

And, by the way, Youtube, does, in fact, make money or otherwise gain value off of every video uploaded through ad placements, demographics they collect, and other data collection they do, so the rights holder to the football clips you're speaking of may simply not be interested in letting Youtube/Google collect any of the valuable demographic data or advertising revenues off the showing of their clips... and so, they request removal of the content, which, as rights holders, they are absolutely entitled to do.

 

Depends on how the terms of service are written for the forum. In most cases I've seen, a forum's TOS state that in exchange for participation in the community, the poster (content producer/intellectual property owner) provides a permanent license to the content posted in the community.

Of course, if someone wanted to be a dick and do a removal request to take down their content in a forum that did not have specific written provisions, such content could be paraphrased and preserved, as the copyright extends to the content written, not to the underlying ideas or information presented.

... and I get the snark.