YouTube Video Taken Down Because Of Background Street Performer Impersonating Michael Jackson
from the beat-it dept
I imagine in some room somewhere, a whole bunch of people in well-tailored suits came up with the idea of DMCA takedowns and thought it'd be just peaches. The practical application of that policy, however, has been something of a performance art piece on how intellectual property is a canard better left on the cutting room floor. YouTube in particular exemplifies this, what with their attempts to comply with rightsholders juxtaposed to a service model that just begs for case studies in inadvertent violations and strong arm attempts by confused non-rightsholders.
Peter writes in with the latest such example, concerning an uploader who put up his trek across the Brooklyn Bridge. The video was taken down for the silliest of reasons.
ANYWAY, I went through all of the trouble of uploading and editing both of these boring-ass videos to a popular Internet video hosting website, only to have the aforementioned website totally mute the Brooklyn Bridge video because there's a Michael Jackson impersonator at the foot of the bridge and he's performing to the song "Beat It," which you can hear in the background.So, someone crossing a bridge has a video of the experience that includes the decades-old song of a deceased performer being reenacted by a street performer... and down the video goes. I imagine the originators of copyright are rolling over in their graves at this point, never imagining that automated systems would trip the flag on this kind of takedown. Even imagining for a moment that this wouldn't or shouldn't be considered fair use, can someone explain to me what the point of all this is?
I'm pretty sure incidental capture of a portion of a song being played by a street performer falls under "fair use," and I've disputed it because I have nothing better to do with my life, but in the meantime I'm inspired by the knowledge that our publicly-traded companies go to such great lengths to protect the copyrights of great Americans like Michael Jackson.The reality of course is that the rights to the song are held by a third party label and this was just the automated system accidentally capturing a video that the label probably wouldn't even bother taking down itself and blah, blah, blah. All I know is this is really stupid and a hindrance to the simple sharing culture that humanity has always enjoyed. Thanks copyright.
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Filed Under: ambient noise, brooklyn bridge, contentid, copyright, dmca, street performer, youtube
Companies: youtube
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One day, this will greet everyone visiting YouTube.
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/sarc
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Incentives
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Headline
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Not seeing it. At least, that's not how I interpreted the headline when I first read it.
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No I am not fucking kidding you. I came here expecting a story about a street performer issuing takedown notices, and it's not about that at all, it's an automatic ContentID takedown.
Here's the headline: "Street Performer Gets Someone's Brooklyn Bridge YouTube Video Taken Down"
Here's what actually happened: "YouTube ContentID Gets Someone's Brooklyn Bridge YouTube Video Taken Down"
You don't see the issue?
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Well, no, I don't, but then again I'm not the type to get a full head of steam over a headline that might have confused 2% of the population before they bothered to read a couple lines of the post....
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The street performer is a minor detail in the story. The actual issue is Youtube automated ContentID blocking. I fail to see how he's mentioned in the headline which implies that he was responsible for taking the video down.
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The headline is a simple subject-verb-object construction. The subject is the street performer. The action is getting something taken down. The object is the video. I don't know how you can miss it. It clearly states that the performer took an action that resulted in the video going down.
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"YoutubeVideo" is the subject
"taken down" is the verb/action
"because of background street performer impersonating Michael Jackson" is a causal attribute
The sentence is intransitive, there is no object.
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No, the street performer was the subject (of the old headline, it's changed now). There was an action, and he was the one who took the action.
"From a functional perspective, a subject is a phrase that conflates nominative case with the topic."
"The nominative case (abbreviated NOM) is one of the grammatical cases of a noun or other part of speech, which generally marks the subject of a verb or the predicate noun or predicate adjective, as opposed to its object or other verb arguments. Generally, the noun "that is doing something" is in the nominative, and the nominative is the dictionary form of the noun."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subject_%28grammar%29
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And I know perfectly well what a nominative is, cause
a) Unlike English my language actually uses more than word order for case marking; and
b) I'm kind of a hobby linguist.
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Ah, I see.
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It's not an issue of confusion, the issue is that the headline doesn't match the story (or reality). I find it strange that you think it's not a problem for the headline to say one thing and the story something else, just because it will all be clear after reading the story.
At the risk of a bad analogy, if some news organization ran the headline "Chris Christie shuts down traffic on GW Bridge" and the story was about how somebody who isn't Chris Christie shut down the GW Bridge, would you think that was no problem that the headline describes something that didn't actually happen, because all the right info is in the story?
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I think the proper analogy would be the headline reading "Traffic shuts down NJ bridge" and you wanting it to say that Chris Christie was responsible. You wouldn't be wrong, but it'd still be silly....
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It's very accurate, although unintentionally misleading.
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Your analogy doesn't hold, unless Chris Christie was doing something on the bridge that cause someone else to mistakenly shut down traffic on the bridge.
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At the least, this was unproductive and arrogant. At the worst, such a response hurts the Techdirt brand.
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But, knowing your name as a regular I'll assume you mean the former. Which is kind of depressing - such a ridiculous story, and the only thing we can find to question is the wording of a headline?
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You're making the classic mistake of assuming that the thing I mentioned is the only thing I'm thinking about the issue. I don't need to point out every single thing that's noteworthy about the story in order to make a comment about one issue. I don't even have to comment on the part of it I think is most important.
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I'm sure we'll agree on other issues you have, but 17 comments into this thread only one person has questioned anything about the story itself, and that was you commenting on the headline. We haven't even got the usual trolls bleating about "anomalies" or calling the author a liar yet. That just strikes me as interesting.
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I call this a personal victory....
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"Street Performer Gets Someone's Brooklyn Bridge YouTube Video Taken Down"
The original headline implies that the performer filed a DMCA. "Street Performance" might have been more precise.
New headline:
"YouTube Video Taken Down Because Of Background Street Performer Impersonating Michael Jackson"
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and that bike snob gets more comments than Techdirt.
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But, YouTube only created ContentID under pressure from the **AAs who refused to work with them on any legal deals until they had such a system in place. As bad as it is, it only exists as a shield between them and massively costly lawsuits that would kill the business anyway - and likely create legal precedents that threaten their competitors as well.
Given that a division of Google have been unable to create a workable system despite their resources and a $30+ million budget (IIRC), what chance to their smaller competitors really have? Veoh might not have put up something like ContentID, for example, but they were sued into bankruptcy before they could prove they weren't guilty of infringement.
I'll agree that they're going about this the wrong way, and that ContentID as it stands is equally harmful to the public and copyright holders alike. But, they're also by far the biggest/richest target so have to put up more defences since they get attacked far more.
"and that bike snob gets more comments than Techdirt."
Quantity doesn't equal quality.
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It doesn't matter that they're forced to do this - it will turn lots of people away from using Youtube to using other services. Either that or face a class action lawsuit from users for taking down fair use videos (or just as bad - redirecting revenue to copyright holders for fair use videos).
As long as Youtube automatically makes changes a video someone uploads without their permission, their system is compromised. It cannot recognize fair use, and should not assume otherwise.
Until they figure that out, I'll use Vimeo.
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Alternative headlines
Singing Michael Jackson in a Public Space? That's a Takedown
YouTube Says "Beat It" to Copyrighted Background Noises
Secondhand Infringement Spurs Takedown
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You mean he's not helping you. :-)
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Censorship
No accident, the intent is total censorship of all competing not corporate cartel content.
Don't think so, they are desperately trying to shift copyright infringement from civil to criminal, what parent will take the chance of their child ending up with a criminal record, of fines and the threat of prison sentences. Psychopathic greed knows no limits except those forced upon it by the sane majority.
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Middle Name
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Aww man...
Hey, maybe the guy could reshoot the same video, but replace the Michael Jackson imitator with a Cindy Lee Garcia imitator. Reproducing only a small amount (fair use) of her "acting" that she did in her "performance", and see how long it took for her to sue Google to get it taken down. Or would that be just a little too esoteric?
Oh well...
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