Sony And YouTube Take Down Sintel; Blender's Open Source, Creative Commons, Crowdfunded Masterpiece

from the how-to-mess-up-everything dept

Pretty much everyone has been sending over the bizarre story of YouTube taking down the film Sintel based on a copyright claim from Sony Pictures. While I imagine it will be back up soon (if not already by the time you read this), as I write this the Sintel link shows the following (and between writing this and posting it, the video was put back up, but all weekend it looked like this): If you're unfamiliar with Sintel, we wrote about it back in 2010. It's an amazingly well-done short animated film created via the open source software Blender, in part to promote how amazing Blender's 3D content creation suite is. The video was partly crowdfunded and was released under a wonderfully broad Creative Commons license that even allowed commercial use (it only required attribution). Sony had nothing to do with any of this.

The Slashdot post about this explains what probably happened here. Sony recently added Sintel to its official 4k demo pool to show off its 4k "ultra HD" TVs. Who knows if they worked out a specific licensed to use it, but under the Creative Commons license, the company wouldn't need to, so long as Sony properly attributed the clip. But, the thinking appears to be that once in the demo pool, the film was somehow added to Sony's "contentID" list of works that Sony claims copyright on, leading YouTube's automated system to pull down the original as infringement. As others have pointed out this highlights almost every possible thing that pisses off people about copyright and automated takedown systems like ContentID.

It's a big company -- one who has fought against the idea that "amateurs" could do powerful work -- taking down a work that it has no copyright claim over. And the work it took down is a well-known example of a freely distributable, Creative Commons-licensed work, created via open source software, and partially crowdfunded. It's hard to think of any other takedown situation that would be more ridiculous or better highlight how broken an automated copyright takedown system is.

Over the last few weeks, in various hearings and conferences, the legacy entertainment industry (and its supporting politicians) have made it pretty clear that they're going to push for automated systems like ContentID to be mandatory in the future. The Sintel takedown by Sony should be the perfect case study in why that's a huge problem.

Filed Under: censorship, content id, copyright, creative commons, crowdfunded, open source
Companies: blender, google, sony, youtube