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YouTube Removes Comedy Central Clips Due to DMCA
Jeff writes "In March, an earlier Slashdot post asked if iTunes sales of the Daily Show would make it harder to share clips online. Well, apparently with the $1.65 billion YouTube acquisition by Google, the answer is now yes. Today, YouTube removed all of its Comedy Central content. Google knew this was coming but you have to wonder if YouTube will be worth that $1.65 billion on Monday. The take down request comes a year after a Wired interview where Daily Show Executive Ben Karlin encouraged viewers to download: 'If people want to take the show in various forms, I'd say go.' Maybe the New York Times Company would have been a better acquisition for Google after all."
If you RTFA "I received a couple of emails from YouTube this afternoon (see below) notifying me that a third party (probably attorneys for Comedy Central) had made a DMCA request to take down Colbert Report and Daily Show clips.". There is no mention whatsoever of a lawsuit.
The corner of a round room
Dear Member:
This is to notify you that we have removed or disabled access to the following material as a result of a third-party notification by Comedy Central claiming that this material is infringing:
Steve Wozniak on Colbert Report 09/28/2006: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oSIfYgbajpk
Please Note: Repeat incidents of copyright infringement will result in the deletion of your account and all videos uploaded to that account. In order to avoid future strikes against your account, please delete any videos to which you do not own the rights, and refrain from uploading additional videos that infringe on the copyrights of others. For more information about YouTube's copyright policy, please read the Copyright Tips guide.
If you elect to send us a counter notice, to be effective it must be a written communication provided to our designated agent that includes substantially the following (please consult your legal counsel or see 17 U.S.C. Section 512(g)(3) to confirm these requirements):
(A) A physical or electronic signature of the subscriber.
(B) Identification of the material that has been removed or to which access has been disabled and the location at which the material appeared before it was removed or access to it was disabled.
(C) A statement under penalty of perjury that the subscriber has a good faith belief that the material was removed or disabled as a result of mistake or misidentification of the material to be removed or disabled.
(D) The subscriber's name, address, and telephone number, and a statement that the subscriber consents to the jurisdiction of Federal District Court for the judicial district in which the address is located, or if the subscriberis address is outside of the United States, for any judicial district in which the service provider may be found, and that the subscriber will accept service of process from the person who provided notification under subsection (c)(1)(C) or an agent of such person.
Such written notice should be sent to our designated agent as follows:
DMCA Complaints
YouTube, Inc.
1000 Cherry Ave.
Second Floor
San Bruno, CA 94066
Email: copyright@youtube.com
Please note that under Section 512(f) of the Copyright Act, any person who knowingly materially misrepresents that material or activity was removed or disabled by mistake or misidentification may be subject to liability.
Sincerely,
YouTube, Inc.
I don't get what this has to do with the DMCA...
The DMCA isn't just about copy protection, it also includes sections that detail the way a copyright holder is to notify a service that hosts user-uploaded content and the way such a service must respond to those notifications. Check out 17 USC 512.
... just go to dailymotion instead.
Up yours DMCA and comedy central!
God Be Gone
I don't get what this has to do with the DMCA...I mean, I think the DMCA is as much a piece of crap as everyone else, but Comedy Central would still have the right to force YouTube to take the content down even without the DMCA. It's just a copyright law violation.
The DMCA isn't all about "no circumventing futile copy protection attempts" and "no telling other people how to circumvent futile copy protection attempts" - this is actually about the good part of the DMCA.
You're right that this would have been a copyright law violation without the DMCA - and YouTube might have been in some serious trouble over it. It's YouTube's servers that were making countless copies of the Colbert Report segments and sending them out, after all. So what is YouTube supposed to do? They can't look at every single user-uploaded video clip and try to match it against every one of the millions of copyrighted works it might be a copy or derivative of. They'd never succeed, and they'd eventually go down in court harder than Napster 1.0. It wouldn't just be YouTube, either - ISPs who run web servers for copyright infringing users' content, maybe even just ISPs who provide bandwidth for infringing users' uploads might have become legal targets.
Part of the DMCA gives service providers a way out. If you want to help someone publish on the internet, but you want to avoid being liable for assisting them if it turns out that what they publish infringes on a copyright, you register an agent with the Copyright office, that agent responds to legal "takedown" notices and counter-notices, and so long as you do basically what YouTube is doing now (give your users a chance to rebut the copyright claim, and keep their material offline unless they do) you're in the clear.
It's not a perfect law, but if all new internet legislation made this much sense I'd feel quite a bit better about the US Congress. How this got stuck in the same bill as the "you can't decrypt the movies you bought" BS, I have no idea.
I think a more likely case is that Comedy Central files a bunch of DMCA requests, and a bunch got taken down. But a "bunch" is hardly "all." And more will be uploaded. The DMCA is a deeply flawed tool (the mandatory takedown window even if you challenge the takedown is nothing less than an infringement of the first amendment), but in this case it's a copyright infringers friend. YouTube is not legally required to police for Comedy Centrals content, only to take content down when informed. Google (YouTube's new owner) has a very slow DMCA processing system (as someone whose used it, I can confirm this). So just don't worry about it. The total amont of infringing content may go down, and older stuff might be harder to find, but there will be lots of Comedy Central on YouTube for a long time.
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When you click on the videos, are they available?
Youtube's indexer has never been just super-current. Oftentimes I'd click on a video only to find that it'd been removed due to terms of use violations.
It's such a fine line between stupid and clever.
It was actually $1.5 billion.