Sony Music Claiming Beyonce's Official YouTube Channel Violates Copyright?

from the left-hand,-right-hand? dept

It really is incredible how screwed up some things are at the major record labels. The latest, via David Johnson, is that it appears (at least as of this writing) that Beyonce's official YouTube channel is blocked in the US due to a copyright infringement issue. I have no idea about if it's blocked elsewhere, but perhaps readers from other countries can let us know. In case they get this sorted out, here's a screenshot: We saw this happen a while back when YouTube and Warner Music had a dispute about a deal, but I was pretty sure that YouTube and Sony Music had a deal in place. Either way, there seems to be some sort of confusion going on.

Filed Under: beyonce, copyright, takedown, youtube
Companies: google, sony music, youtube

Damages Possible, But Limited, For Bogus DMCA Takedowns

from the good-and-bad dept

We had discussed earlier this year just how damages should be figured out (and if they should be available at all) for bogus DMCA takedowns. The law, technically, says that there can be punishment, but it's rare to see a case ever get that far. In the ongoing Lenz v. Universal Music, however, (about the video takedown of a child dancing to less than 30 seconds of a Prince song), the judge has ruled that damages are available, but at the same time limited how those damages might be calculated. So, there's some good, in that filing bogus DMCA takedowns can lead to damages, but the amounts are likely to be so small in most cases as to be meaningless. Compare this, of course, with the statutory damages given to those who infringe on copyrights -- starting at $750 for sharing a single item and going way up from there. How is that equitable? Basically, the incentive is quite strong for copyright holders to continue to file DMCA's willy-nilly, knowing that the threat of errors is mostly minimal, even as the impact is to silence one's free speech -- which should be seen as a bigger issue than interfering with someone's business model.

Filed Under: copyright, damages, dmca, lenz, takedown
Companies: universal music

Bogus Copyright Claim Silences Yet Another Larry Lessig YouTube Presentation

from the not-this-again... dept

Nearly a year ago, we wrote about how a YouTube presentation done by well known law professor (and strong believer in fair use and fixing copyright law), Larry Lessig, had been taken down, because his video, in explaining copyright and fair use and other such things, used a snippet of a Warner Music song to demonstrate a point. There could be no clearer example of fair use -- but the video was still taken down. There was some dispute at the time as to whether or not this was an actual DMCA takedown, or merely YouTube's audio/video fingerprinting technology (which the entertainment industry insists can understand fair use and not block it). But, in the end, does it really make a difference? A takedown over copyright is a takedown over copyright.

Amazingly enough, it appears that almost the exact same thing has happened again. A video of one of Lessig's presentations, that he just posted -- a "chat" he had done for the OpenVideoAlliance a week or so ago, about open culture and fair use, has received notice that it has been silenced. It hasn't been taken down entirely -- but the entire audio track from the 42 minute video is completely gone. All of it. In the comments, some say there's a notification somewhere that the audio has been disabled because of "an audio track that has not been authorized by WMG" (Warner Music Group) -- which would be the same company whose copyright caused the issue a year ago -- but I haven't seen or heard that particular message anywhere.

However, Lessig is now required to fill out a counternotice challenging the takedown -- while silencing his video in the meantime: While you can still see the video on YouTube, without the audio, it's pretty much worthless. Thankfully, the actual video is available elsewhere, where you can both hear and see it. But, really, the fact that Lessig has had two separate videos -- both of which clearly are fair use -- neutered due to bogus copyright infringement risks suggests a serious problem. I'm guessing that, once again, this video was likely caught by the fingerprinting, rather than a direct claim by Warner Music. In fact, the issue may be the identical one, as I believe the problem last year was the muppets theme, which very, very briefly appears in this video (again) as an example of fair use in action. But it was Warner Music and others like it that demanded Google put such a fingerprinting tool in place (and such companies are still talking about requiring such tools under the law). And yet, this seems to show just how problematic such rules are.

Even worse, this highlights just how amazingly problematic things get when you put secondary liability on companies like Google. Under such a regime, Google would of course disable such a video, to avoid its own liability. The idea that Google can easily tell what is infringing and what is not is proven ridiculous when something like this is pulled off-line (or just silenced). When a video about fair use itself is pulled down for a bogus copyright infringement, it proves the point. The unintended consequences of asking tool providers to judge what is and what is not copyright infringement lead to tremendous problems with companies shooting first and asking questions later. They are silencing speech, on the threat that it might infringe on copyright.

This is backwards.

We live in a country that is supposed to cherish free speech, not stifle it in case it harms the business model of a company. We live in a country that is supposed to encourage the free expression of ideas -- not lock it up and take it down because one company doesn't know how to adapt its business model. We should never be silencing videos because they might infringe on copyright.

Situations like this demonstrate the dangerous unintended consequences of secondary liability. At least with Lessig, you have someone who knows what happened, and knows how to file a counternotice -- though, who knows how long it will take for this situation to be corrected. But for many, many, many other people, they are simply silenced. Silenced because of industry efforts to turn copyright law into something it was never intended to be: a tool to silence the wider audience in favor of a few large companies.

The system is broken. When even the calls to fix the system are silenced by copyright claims, isn't it time that we fixed the system?

Filed Under: copyright, fair use, larry lessig, silencing, takedown, videos, youtube

And A Million Rickrolls Went Silent... Demonstrating The Problem Of Pressuring Google To Takedown Without Due Process

from the this-is-what-you-get dept

So, just after the news came out last night that Google execs were criminals for not taking down videos fast enough, suddenly people started noticing that the original infamous Rickroll video had been taken down, due to a "terms of service" violation. While some assumed that it was a copyright takedown, usually Google is pretty good about clarifying when it's an actual copyright takedown. This was clearly something different. After a few hours of people screaming about missing Rick Astley, Google put the video back up, saying it was caused by too many people "flagging" the video as violating the terms of service, leading to yanking the video.

In the end, this demonstrates the difficult position that Google is put in. It's getting sued by entertainment companies, threatened by politicians and now convicted of crimes for being "too slow" in taking down "bad" videos (with "bad" often being loosely defined). So it creates systems to try to speed up the process, and the end result is that those systems can be abused as well, leading to videos getting taken down without due process. What's amazing is that people still think that Google can easily figure out which videos should be kept up and which should be taken down -- but when you consider just how much content is on the site, and the difficulty of reviewing any complaints, and the likelihood of both false positives and false negatives in reviewing videos, it's really incredible that anyone thinks it's reasonable for Google to take responsibility for the content.

The "rickroll" incident is a pretty clear indicator of why trying to put secondary liability on a third party like Google will almost certainly lead to more incidents like this -- where legitimate content is taken offline due to a legally mandated itchy trigger finger.

Filed Under: flagging, rickroll, secondary liability, takedown, youtube
Companies: google

ADM Says Video Mocking Them Is Copyright Infringement; Abuses Copyright Law To Stifle Free Speech

from the not-cool dept

So we just had that post about how a TV station in Boston was abusing copyright law to take down slightly embarrassing video of a weatherman it employs. In the post, I noted that while this was just over a potentially off-color joke, there were important free speech implications to it. Law professor Peter Friedman quickly points us to a more serious case of a giant company stifling criticism through DMCA takedown. Apparently, food conglomerate, Archers Daniel Midland (famous, among other things, for getting caught in a massive blatant price-fixing scheme that made pretty much all of your food a lot more expensive than it needed to be), doesn't believe criticism of its CEO should be allowed. Friedman had posted a link to a video that took a bland, boring video of ADM's CEO droning on about "agriculture's role in the growing economy," and edited it to "make it appear as if she were speaking openly on behalf of an evil multinational bent on the gross and horrific exploitation of the world and especially of multinational food markets." Honestly, the original video looks just like the ridiculous corporate video that is made in the movie Michael Clayton, about a company that is clearly supposed to be ADM.

Friedman points out how this is a clear abuse of copyright law and a violation of free speech:

This is outright copyright abuse. Criticism is fair use. When anyone asks whether in fact fair use is grounded in the Constitution's guarantee of free speech, all you need is to think of a situation like this -- one can appropriate copyrighted works to criticize and parody the copyright holder. And to use the copyright laws to silence that critique has nothing to do with protecting intellectual property and the rights of a creator to profit from his, her, or its creation: it's unconstitutional censorship!

The courts have tried to reconcile the question of how copyright law can possibly survive a First Amendment challenge (after all, the First Amendment says Congress shall make no law that interferes with freedom of speech... and yet that's exactly what copyright does) by saying that a robust fair use exception is the key to making it okay. But when fair use is trampled on repeatedly, it makes you wonder how anyone can still claim that copyright isn't a massive abuse of the First Amendment.

Filed Under: copyright, dmca, free speech, takedown
Companies: adm, archer daniels midland

TV Station Issuing DMCA Takedowns To Try To Hide Weatherman Making A Bad Joke

from the fair-use-anyone? dept

It's been well documented how many people/organizations abuse the DMCA takedown process to try (and usually fail) to make content they don't like disappear, even if there's a legitimate reason for it being up. In the latest such example, a weatherman in Boston made a comment that many considered to be... a bit off-color for the local evening news. In discussing the snowfall in certain areas, he noted: "Picking up some snow are we? Yes we are. In Princeton we picked up 9 inches of snow and in Billerica we had 7." Then there's a brief pause before he steps forward and says: "The biggest amount I could find--almost as big as me--about 9 inches." The station came up with an explanation for the statement, saying that he had a problem with his monitor and was displayed funny -- and thought that the viewing audience could see him that way too. Perhaps.

Still, though, the station, WHDH, has been aggressively issuing DMCA takedowns over the video (who knows how long the video above will stay up), even though it's almost certainly fair use, and courts have found that those sending takedowns need to take fair use into account. Justin Silverman, over at the Citizen Media Law Project, explains succinctly why this is almost certainly fair use:

In this case there's a fairly strong argument that the 27-second clip of Bouchard is fair. The amount of the original broadcast used is very small, the purpose of the clip is to spur public discussion, and there is arguably no effect on WHDH's news market. It's likely WHDH either didn't consider fair use before ordering the clip's takedown, or it simply didn't care.

And that's an issue. The DMCA allows copyright holders to shoot first and not care later. And that's a problem, because it can put a serious crimp on public discussion (which raises some serious First Amendment questions). Yes, in this case, it's just an off-color joke, but in many other cases it could be much more important speech.

Filed Under: dmca, joke, takedown
Companies: whdh, youtube

Canadian Government Shuts Down Yet Another Yes Men Parody... Takes Down 4,500 Innocent Sites

from the collateral-prank-damage dept

Famous politico-pranksters The Yes Men have a long history of putting forth convincing parody websites that get those they parody to rush around to get the websites offline. Back in 2007, there was the fake ExxonMobil site that got pulled. Earlier this year it was the fake Chamber of Commerce site that the real Chamber issued a DMCA takedown over. The latest prank is based up in Canada, with the Yes Men setting up some parody sites of Canadian government organizations, promising massive greenhouse emissions reductions. This greatly upset the Canadian government who ordered the websites' service provider to pull them down. However, as Michael Geist points out, in the rush to pull down the sites, the ISP also took down 4,500 other websites. Seems like quite a bit of unnecessary collateral damage. Of course, this is exactly what the Yes Men want. For every takedown, they get another burst of publicity.

Filed Under: canada, innocents, parody, takedown, yes men

Games Workshop Goes After Its Biggest Fans With Takedown Order

from the when-will-they-learn dept

dave blevins points us to the unfortunate news that game publisher Games Workshop seems to be attacking its biggest fans by ordering the super popular site BoardGameGeek to takedown all fan-made player aids. Basically, the biggest fans of Game Workshop's games have been helping make those games better, including "scenarios, rules summaries, inventory manifests, scans to help replace worn pieces." Basically increasing the value of those games so that it's easier to play them and easier to keep playing them. And, in response, Games Workshop sends out its lawyers? How does that possibly make any sense at all?

Filed Under: fans, games, takedown
Companies: boardgamegeeks, games workshop

MPAA/Sony Pictures Realizes That Shutting Down Muni-WiFi Over Single Download Was A Bad Thing

from the back-up dept

Last week, we wrote about the ridiculous situation, whereby the MPAA had an entire muni-WiFi network shut down because one person using that system had downloaded a single film. The story ended up getting a fair amount of press, and it looks like the MPAA and Sony Pictures in particular, quickly realized that this was really, really bad publicity for the company. After the company got bombarded by complaints, Sony Pictures contacted the town and asked them to turn the WiFi back on, while also claiming it could help the town set up tools to block such things in the future. Of course, as Broadband Reports notes in the above link: "Of course if the MPAA and Sony had approached the network owners like human beings in the first place -- instead of engaging in the kind of scorched earth tactics they've employed for several years now -- they probably wouldn't have gotten the bad press to begin with." But, acting like human beings in the first place isn't the sort of thing the industry does well.

Filed Under: muni-wifi, takedown
Companies: mpaa, sony pictures

Last Call For Techdirt DMCA Takedown Shirt

from the last-call dept

Just a final reminder that if you want the Techdirt DMCA Takedown T-shirt, today is the last day to order them, either alone or with my Approaching Infinity book. And, remember, we also have the regular Techdirt logo t-shirt (and again, the logo t-shirt with the book) and the Techdirt logo hoodie, all of whose sales end tonight at midnight PT. The DMCA t-shirt has proven to be incredibly popular (sales have far outstripped our last t-shirt), so if you want in on the fun, make sure to order one in the next few hours. We're thrilled so many people like the shirt so much...

Filed Under: cwf, dmca, rtb, t-shirt, takedown