Collateral Damage: Viacom's YouTube Takedowns Include Personal Home Videos
from the whoops dept
We've covered Viacom's demand that YouTube takedown approximately 100,000 clips based on copyright violations, but how did they come up with those 100,000 videos. Not too carefully, it appears. Reports are starting to show up of people with perfectly legitimate videos getting caught in the crossfire. One person found that his 30 second home video of some friends at dinner was yanked offline at Viacom's request. Not even the name of the video would confuse people into associating it with a Viacom property -- but, thanks to the DMCA, YouTube immediately took the video down. While the guy can now reply and show that the takedown was a mistake, but it still seems a bit unfair that Viacom can just yank anyone's video offline that quickly.Thank you for reading this Techdirt post. With so many things competing for everyone’s attention these days, we really appreciate you giving us your time. We work hard every day to put quality content out there for our community.
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version of youtube hosted outside the US? and probably outside europe as well.
not so much to actually get anywhere, but get 'good enough' that it can be used to point out how all this copyright excess is actually harming companies.
and maybe just maybe point out that 'fair' regulation within the states/europe is better than draconican regulation within and everybody avoiding it by going elsewhere.
btw: not in favour of random copyright violations, but to me they should have had to point out:
1, which clip they want to take down
2, the reason it infinges, not just that they think it does so.
I'm sort of assuming they have done a blanket search, and a takedown for the results.
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Yeah, that sucks.
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better opportunity
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It's funny...
If companies expect sites to respect their copyrights then shouldn't they at least have the professional (and legal) courtesy to at least properly identify the videos that are infringing on their copyrights?
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Mobile YouTube = MYUBO?
http://www.myubo.com
http://myubo.mobi
Even though MYUBO is still in beta phase it has already captured the attention of Internet and mobile phone users.
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Re: Mobile YouTube = MYUBO?
Both of which don't belong in comments, but that might be just my personal opinion...
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hrmm....
Last I checked it was illegal for a company to conduct actions such as viacoms and they are required to perform some kind of due diligence before taking legal actions against them. Some part of the RICO statutes perhaps?
I don't remember exactly, and thats why its a good thing I'm not a lawyer, but if I were one of the thousands of individuals that was innocently getting hit by takedown notices, I would probably be trying to slay the goliath with any tool necessary.
(again, good thing I'm not a lawyer...)
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Re: hrmm....
YouTube is removing videos...the onus of responsibility lies with YouTube not Viacom. To that end, if youtube pulls a video by mistake, there is no damage, there is no issue.
Read the terms of service, youtube can do remove any video it wants at any time.
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Re: Re: hrmm....
I didn't say anything about the actions youtube, I'm talking about the actions of viacom.
Youtube isnt bullying, they are complying with the law. Its viacom that is bullying here.
The ToS is just as irrelevant as it is in any other usage. You can put in the ToS that all my base are belong to you and that doesnt mean jack.
Of course youtube CAN remove the video, but that doesnt give viacom the right to make them.
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Re: hrmm....
Real world: My video got yanked in this pogrom. My response? Fuck it. Not worth my time.
See also the unwillingness of citizens to protest heinous actions by their governments, right up until their own lives/livelihoods are threatened. There was plenty of writing about the American Revolution, with no action. Once the East India Tea Company started undercutting the colonists b/c the Crown exempted them from tariffs, etc., THEN the revolt began.
Ideology doesn't drive the revolution.
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Who give a fluck
Even if they removed a 1000 wrong videos for every 100,000 legitimate removals, that's barelystatistically significant.
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I give a ....
YT/GV play along so they don't get sued. However if MY video gets removed because of a FALSE identification to something that is (C), I have a problem with that. IF YT/GV say your vid is crap, we removed it coz we want to, that's fine. but if they sya, oh yeah the ABCDEFG company wants it removed, and we just blindly follow themm, i DO have a problem.
it is leading to thecomplete business controlled society.
i like the idea that if a company wants something removed, they must provide a legitimate reason FOR EACH item to be removed. you want 100k videos removed, submit 100k forms, one for each vid. describing the offense.
if they don't, have them pay YT/GV say, $1000 per vid. that'll get them going.
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But...
Ideology doesn't drive the revolution.
It doesn't drive the revolution but without someone speaking about it the revolution may not happen. If the people of the colonies weren't writing literature about revolution they may not have risen up in arms even after they found out about the tax breaks given the India Tea Company.
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video
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Viacom's brand is hurting
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hurting their own pockets
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are you all ignorant children?
The DMCA appears to be a little heavy handed. However, this problem wouldn't have occurred if YouTube did not encourage the expropriation of Viacom's property so that YouTube/Google could profit. The real battle here is between two giant companies, Viacom and Google. Viacom trying to defend its property rights and Google trying to violate them for massive profit.
The little guy who claims to be damaged when his video is taken down from YouTube is making a bogus claim. The little guy whose choses to upload his video to a free service engaged in massive property-right violations should not be surprised that he gets what he pays for.
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Re: are you all ignorant children?
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Bogus Claim?
I'm one of the "little guys". An original work that took me five months to create has been picked up, falsely, as the property of Viacom.
If Youtube had simply removed the video while this was being disputed, I might not have suffered any real damage, but they're displaying a message claiming that this is Viacom's property, not mine. This is clear-cut defamation.
And the recourse is a lot slower than the original action. I sent the counter-claim back four days ago.
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Statutory Declaration, on a papaer form.
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use the DMCA against Viacom
i think the public needs to start finding ways to use the DMCA against corporations, and then see how quickly they freak out about it.
to me though, this does sound like Viacom violated a lot of peoples digital copyright. it would be like NBC somehow ordering the takedown of CBS shows on YouTube or knocking CBS off the air or cable channels.
well, that does happen in Canada... under screwed up Canadian law that allows a network to over-right another networks programming.
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Convenient YouTube/Viacom roundup
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download youtube
http://www.downloadvideos-convert.com/online-video-downloader.html
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http://www.downloadvideos-convert.com/youtube-videos-to-ipod.html
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