IV. FINDING A SOLUTION THROUGH CROWDSOURCING
“Crowdsourcing” is defined as “the practice of obtaining needed services,
ideas, or content by soliciting contributions from a large group of people and
especially from the online community rather than from traditional employees or
suppliers.”213 Large ISPs that receive thousands of DMCA requests, yet hire
employees or utilize computer programs to filter out copyright-protected material,
are ignoring their greatest asset—users that created the content. Every minute
users are uploading over 100 hours of content to YouTube.214 These videos are
then viewed at a rate of over six billion hours per month.215 Furthermore, many
viewers not only watch these videos, but also provide feedback on the video.
More than half of all the videos on YouTube are either rated or commented upon
by the users.216
These are billions of users that could be utilized to shoulder the enormous
task of separating piracy and fair use. Rather than employing a small cadre of
employees hopelessly looking for piracy, or utilizing a fully automated system
that will certainly flag non-infringing material, an ISP can ask its own users to
solve this problem. Why have one person watching millions of videos for piracy
when you can have millions of people watching one video? By placing the
burden of identifying the material on the users, ISPs are able to make the task far