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15-Year-Old Scams YouTube
SurturZ writes "A fifteen year old from Perth, Australia, posed as an employee of the Australian Broadcasting Commission, demanding that YouTube remove hundreds of video clips of 'The Chasers War on Everything.' The amusing part is that The Chaser is a comedy company well known to perpetrate exactly this sort of prank."
YHBT (Youtube has been trolled)
As copyright holder I DEMAND Slashdot remove all first posts from all stories now and in the future.
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=230785&cid=187 29299
The teenager has since apologised.
My thoughts on this: Google simply took down the videos and sent out copyright infringement notices to the users who had put them up, without contacting the ABC to verify the claim. This kid claimed to be representing the ABC, so obviously if Google had contacted him to confirm the claim, they still would have problems, which is why they should have contact the ABC directly.
The copyright is owned by the ABC (or the Chaser crew), but they give permission to use it anywhere and everywhere.
I wank in the shower.
I'm not usually one to find 'disruptive' pranks funny, but this doesn't seem too far off the kind of things do they on the show (which I've not seen). If companies will put out shows that do just these kind of stunts, and aimed at the teenage/early 20's demographic it's of course no surprise.
This seems largely harmless in the end, and ABC seem to be taking it in good faith (recognising the irony, I assume). I'm happy that it brings attention to how worth while it is to have a system where you make some attempt to verify the authenticity of a claim of ownership when a takedown is issued.
I know with the DMCA you are supposed to take down content when a complaint is made - and not dick around establishing ownership (and you should then put it back up if the origional party claims it's legitimate - and then it's up the two parties to fight it out in court), but are you at least allowed to verify the request was sent by the party that claims to have sent it? If not, it seems like a significant oversight in the process.
If the people who drafted this legislation had any idea about the technology they were dealing with, they could at least have mandated requests be digitally signed with the public key of the content holder (with a certificate that is backed by one of a number of trusted authorities).
From TFA: "Everyone does dumb stuff when they are fifteen," Ms Gibson told ABC Radio.
Personally I think this is great, not dumb. It's a far cry from the typical prank done by a 15 year old and really shows some ingenuity and humour...
If I were in the position to give the kid a job, I would.
Brilliant, I look forward to the next Chaser episode - I expect they're going to sing his praises for such a cool stunt... and I'll upload it to YouTube for you too :-)
If you live in Australia and haven't seen The Chaser it's one of the funniest shows that we've got (9pm on ABC 1). If you don't live here, you can download every episode, legally at http://www.abc.net.au/tv/chaser/war/vodcast/.