Fox In The Henhouse: Uses Someone Else's YouTube Clip In Family Guy, Then Takes Down The Original

from the because-that's-how-it's-done! dept

At the recent Copyright Office roundtable on the DMCA, a representative from Fox was adamant about pushing for stronger punishment for sites that hosted infringing content. But she also made sure to respond to a point raised earlier about abusive takedowns. Someone had pointed out that in 2013, Fox had issued a bogus DMCA notice that took down a copy of Cory Doctorow's excellent book Homeland, because its robotic censors couldn't distinguish Cory's novel from its TV show of the same name. Before launching into her speech pushing for expanding copyright laws to provide more power for censorship, she wanted to "explain" what happened with Cory's book, and said that it happened because Doctorow's book "was on torrent sites" -- as if this made it okay. That leaves out the kind of important fact that Doctorow released the book under a Creative Commons license that allowed it to be shared anywhere, including torrent sites.

So given that bit of background, I do wonder what the excuse from Fox will be for this latest fuckup, in which Fox used someone else's YouTube video of a bug in the old Nintendo basketball game Double Dribble for a large clip in the show Family Guy... and then after the episode was added to ContentID wiped out the original: Yes, of course, after TorrentFreak posted about this late last week and the news started to spread, the takedown was lifted -- either by Fox or by YouTube itself -- but it again highlights the problems with these demands for automated filtering or notice-and-staydown systems. They don't work very well in many, many situations. And they create complications like this one -- and not everyone will get a site with a large following to write a story about it, getting enough attention to get the situation fixed. So many people on the copyright legacy side of things keep insisting that it's "easy" to just take down actually infringing stuff. Yet, time and time again, that's been shown to be wrong. There are lots of mistakes, and when you're talking about expression, we shouldn't tolerate systems that allow someone to automatically censor speech.

Filed Under: clips, contentid, copyright, double dribble, family guy, takedowns
Companies: fox, youtube