As the saying goes "there are two sides of the same coin", two approaches to Internet are the centralism and the decentralism, and I prefer the latter one.
Decentralism is mainly because of the user participation and collective intelligence, which is a good excuse for YouTube's liability to infringement but a miss for the China's Great Fire Wall
project.
According to DMCA1998, if the service provider could prove 1) does not have the constructive knowledge of infringing activity; 2) cant control the infringing activity and does not benefit directly from the infringing activity; 3) remove the infringing content promptly once receive the copyright holder's notification, the service provider could be exempt from injunctions. YouTube has been actively practicing the third provision, both falls into gray area of the first two. It is really difficult for YouTube to clean up all the infringing content because of users' effort. Some of clips are infringing; some could be fair use; and some of the clips dont have the identification tag that the system cant automatically detect them; and even YouTube moves them from on account others can secretly continue upload. Also, some users come to the site are just looking for user generated content, in such circumstances, YouTube is benefiting directly from non-infringing content. So, the user participation gives excuses, at least, enough arguments for the Viacom v YouTube case.
As for the GFW project, though the censorship is getting worse (YouTube is completely blocked by end of the April), users' collective intelligence and participation efforts make it possible to break the GFW. Users still can try proxy and VPN services to pass GFW to access foreign websites, and for domestic uses, users have developed many new words to avoid sensitive words block. The ironic thing is we all know GFW blacklist for sensitive words is unpredictable, yet, users intelligence to develop new words for reference is weigh more unpredictable and innovative. Therefore, GFW can never completely stop the access. Sadly, they will try physical violent ways then sometimes. Still, the decentralism makes it not that strong.
Here's a video that describes one of the latest popular Internet slang in China, and an article that explains how the GFW function, a nice piece. And, they are both in Chinese..
Interpret the GFW and Break the GFW
http://course.ccert.edu.cn/blog/dingxuan/2009/04/30/gfw/
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