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More DMCA Censorship at Yahoo!
Thomas Hawk writes "Once again a Yahoo! user has found themselves on the short end of the DMCA stick. Video blogger Loren Feldman recently found that his video mocking (read parody) the Village People and blogger Shel Israel was removed from the Yahoo! service after Scorpio Music served Yahoo! with a DMCA takedown notice. The video in question contained a very brief fair use parody snippet of the Village People song YMCA as performed by a puppet. What's more, Yahoo! threatened Feldman with the termination of all of his Yahoo! services including the revocation of his Yahoo ID."
No.
Since Yahoo! is in the delicate stage of being bought out by Microsoft, they're trying to avoid any lawsuits that could cause the buying price to be pulled lower. This is probably the reason that they are acting like consummate assholes. Normally the yahoos couldn't care less about pissant grandstanding through dubious legal stunts, but...this is a delicate moment in the take-over process.
Maybe Microsoft is behind this in order to use a barrage of picayune lawsuits as a justification for lowering their bid offer. Goodness knows, Microsoft's staff of eager-beaver Ivy League lawyers do live for this kind of thing.
Unless the Village People own Scorpio Music, it's their handlers getting their panties in a twist and not the performers themselves.
File a counter notice. You've got rights. Exercise them.
Again a DMCA notice... this is not the first time it happens to a user. Also non-USA citizens are subject to this crazy law, when they post material on a US based server. Or not even necessarily that it seems, do legal reverse-engineering or encryption related work in your own country, visit the USA, get arrested, it's possible, no? But leave that discussion for later.
What actually surprises me is that there are no similar portals in e.g. the EU. All major portals and sharing sites are US based - Yahoo!, MSN, Flickr, Youtube, Facebook, MySpace, you name it, they are all in the USA, I can't think of anyone based fully in Europe. And as such they are subject to the US's draconian copyright laws.
This again makes me wonder why none is being set up outside of the US jurisdiction. How about a facebook.de, or a youtube.nl, fully hosted in that country, and incorporated there as well. What is holding the Internet back? It is not that Europe doesn't have the IT infrastructure, on the contrary. It may be better than what's available in the USA. Same accounts for the people. I may assume there as much business sense on both sides of the pond.
Yet all these video-sharing and other creative enterprises on the Internet seem to sprout and flourish mostly in the USA. The world is really a wonderful place.
They probably should since they could then bill the offending parties for the resources spent investigating their frequently bogus notices. Sure you'd have to do some manuvering to setup a MS technical support style system. But set up as a credit card hold that will be refunded should the apperatus involved find the content indeed infringing, Yahoo could probably make money on it. In the mean time jackasses like Prince, KISS, Madonna, and apparently the Village People would be diminished and in fact paying to improve everyone else's service experience. The beauty of a setup like this is that it's in Yahoo's interest to set an extremely high barrier, and maximize the number of credit card charges.
Then in the instances where they have to go to court, their countersuit remedy should ask that the supposedly infringed work in the public domain in the event they prevail. One company engaging in that sort of brinksmanship winning one time would make all the other paper people better corporate citizens.
a very brief fair use parody snippet of the Village People song YMCA as performed by a puppet.
Isn't "fair use" for a court to decide?
Yahoo! threatened Feldman with the termination of all of his Yahoo! services including the revocation of his Yahoo ID
Isn't it great having everything integrated into one easy-to-use service? Pictures, searching, games, dating services, emai--oh fuck--they just canceled everything in my entire life.
Same goes for Google everything. If one company controls all the services you use, all it takes is one idiot at that company to make your life hell.
There's no place like
Mod this post up, dammit. The performers in the Village People have *never* owned the rights to their music, their videos, or even their images. If you only have the typical /. understanding of the entertainment business, then please keep the vitriol bottled up until you do a little reading, okay? I promise to do the same thing next time there's an article that demands a cursory familiarity with C++ or PHP or Web Ruby on Rails 2.0...