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Viacom Claims Copyright On Irrlicht Video
stinkytoe writes in with the news that Nikolaus Gebhardt, developer of the cross-platform game engine library Irrlicht, recently had one of his video tutorials taken off of YouTube. A thread on Irrlicht's forum contains a copy of the takedown notice. From Gebhardt's blog: "Viacom, the corporation behind MTV, DreamWorks and Paramount is now claiming they own the copyright on a video of an Irrlicht tutorial. Which is completely ridiculous, of course: The whole thing has been written by me and the Irrlicht team, even textures and skins and logos have been created by me, and an Irrlicht Engine user... simply filmed and published it on YouTube.com. Here is a screenshot of the tutorial, it's really just a 2D GUI rendered using the 3D engine, nothing special at all."
Apparently Viacom owns the rights to a few people eating dinner as well.
There happens to be a 1972 album by Klaus Schulze that is also called Irrlicht which was originally released in 1972 and then re-released in 2006. Perhaps Viacom owns the rights to this album and their search bot mistakenly flagged the video as a copyrighted work.
Per Groklaw - Slander of Title would apply to this, if you can show some sort of malice. If there were a pattern of the types of videos they 'erroneously' had taken down, it would go a long way towards establishing malice. However, if there is just a bunch of random crap thrown into the legitimate claims, then it's unlikely that you would be able to persue a Slander of Title claim very far.
They have obviously failed to check on the actual status of the Copyrights for the video, which would set them up for a negligence suit. Since it's a tutorial on using a companies software, you might sneak it in under 'Tortuous Interferance' - ie. their actions are causing harm to the company's business and are not related to competition by VIACOM itself. [irony]MS couldn't claim interfierance by Apple just because Apple sells an OS. If Apple were to blackmail/bribe software houses into not developing for MS, then there would be a legitimate suit.[/irony]
Of course if you want to be boring, you could go with
Depending on how many of the videos they asked to have taken down were not infringing on their copyrights, then this might be a prime target for a CAS against Viacom. That would rattle their chain - and might give the other big distributors a pause before they sent out mass takedown notices as well.
YouTube and Google are not supposed to demand proof. The DMCA is very specific: The party who believes their copyright has been infringed must send a signed statement stating that the copyright is theirs, under penalty of perjury. Once that has happened, the ISP must take down the content if they don't want to risk being held liable for having the content.
So if Viacom sent the DMCA request, then the beef of the actual copyright owner is with Viacom, not with the ISP.
paintball
This was hashed out in a Slashdot interview with a copyright lawyer. If you're sending a notice to an ISP saying that "You're hosting work 'A' which is an unauthorized copy of my work 'X', take it down", the perjury part only applies to your ownership claim of 'X'. For example, if I put up a copy of OpenOffice and my ISP gets a takedown notice from MS saying "You're hosting an unauthorized copy of MS-Office, which we swear we own" then MS is free and clear. They /do/ own the copyright for MS-Office. And it's /hardly/ their fault that they mistook OpenOffice and MS-Office. Whoops. No harm, no foul!
I agree the system is broken, I just wanted to clarify the perjury part.
-jdm