It's not arbitrary at all. To continue with the bar analogy, YouTube is the bar owner, and the person uploading the video is the bartender who mixed your drink. The landlord in YouTube's case is Google, who, by virtue of the fact that they also own the bar, rather than merely renting space to the party that does, has to assume liability for what happens in the bar.

In the case of EC2, Amazon owns the building, and lets a space to you, to do with more or less what you will. If that happens to be running a bar that serves underage drinkers, how is that their responsibility?

Edited to add: Except, of course, in the case where they've been notified that you are, in fact, serving underage customers. Most leases have verbiage that allows the lessor to break the agreement and boot your ass if you're using the space to break the law. That's how they qualify for safe harbor.

Yes, it's quite arbitrary. The bar analogy sucks. (Most analogies suck.)

The only difference between YouTube and Amazon EC2 is flexibility of purpose. You can do many different things with an EC2 account because it was designed to let you do those things. You can upload videos to a YouTube account and not much more because YT was designed to do one thing well.

What they have in common is that they are both hosting services and apps platforms. They both host your data and applications. The fact that the "window" into EC2 from the outside is whatever the account holder wants it to be, whereas the window into YT is just YT's interface... is totally irrelevant.

The bottom line is that both Amazon and YouTube are hosting your data on their servers, and allowing you to present that data to the public at large. If one of them is responsible for legality of your content, then both of them must be.

That bar analogy is sounding awfully tenuous by this point. Was YouTube paying people to upload the video?

The difference is that YouTube profits from the videos, EC2 rents generic capacity to someone who could choose to profit from them.

> The difference is that YouTube profits from the videos, EC2 rents generic capacity to someone who could choose to profit from them.

So profit = bad? Do you think that Amazon runs EC2 as a pro-bono effort?

  Amazon                     YouTube
  ------                     -------
  Rents Generic Space        Rents specific space (videos-only)
  Charges Rental Fees        Free rent
  Provides a minimal API     Provides a nice web front-end tailor to specific space
  Profits from rental fees   Profits from adverts in/around the videos

Please explain the huge difference here and how the law should differentiate between one service and another. Is the major difference here that YouTube uses advertising to turn a profit rather than rental fees? Is that really what makes them deserving of losing safe-harbor? Do the GeoCities-type hosting services also fall into this niche because they monetize through advertising rather than fee-collection?

[Note: I've never used EC2 so I don't know what they provide other than a low-level (and maybe a high-level) API into their space]

{edit} Some more points:

* If you don't like that fact that YouTube does not rent generic space and rents space specifically for videos, then how do you rectify more to-the-metal type services that rent space specifically for video, or music distribution, but still profit from rental fees (instead of ads)? Do they qualify the same as YouTube because they are not providing 'generic space?'

* Do you not like that Google possibly profits more from popular videos than from unpopular videos (i.e. you don't like that they profit more or less based on the content of the video)? If this is the case, how is it any different than Amazon EC2 profiting more from someone that serves large files that such up copious amounts of bandwidth if they get to be popular/highly downloaded? {/edit}

I don't understand this at all. YouTube profits off of the video service they provide for free to their users, so they're bad?

I need an emoticon indicating total bafflement.

It's about the technology being more generic. If you control the service (obviously you don't with YouTube) the host should have safe harbor. If a host controls the service, they are responsible for it's content.