Slashdot Mirror
Prince DMCAs YouTube To Block Radiohead Song
Enigma2175 writes "CNN is reporting that videos from the Coachella music festival showing Prince covering Radiohead's 'Creep' have been removed by Prince's label, NPG records. Thom Yorke of Radiohead, when told of Prince's action, said 'Well, tell him to unblock it. It's our... song.' No comment from YouTube or Prince yet. Under the DMCA, YouTube is not required to verify the entity making a request is actually the copyright holder and this seems to be just another example of DMCA abuse." As the article points out, Prince seems to have a love-hate relationship with the Interwebs.
As Kevin Smith once revealed:
t's 3 in the morning in Minnesota. I really need a camel . Go get it. - Prince
(Yes, I know it was partly farcical, but the basic premise is sound - he's a loon.)
"Powers. I have them."
I think there's some room for interpretation here. Maybe a performance can not be copyrighted, but there are privacy rights to be considered. If this was a free concert in the park, Prince did not have a reasonable cause to believe it was private and any recording would be permissible. However, if it was in a closed venue where there were published rules about video recording, he could get it removed because it is a privacy violation.
It's kind of like paparazzi shots that get published. If someone had to break into your property to get them, then anyone who publishes them (and the original paparazzo) could be sued. However, if you're sunbathing nude and can be seen from a neighbor's balcony, any picture taken from there is legal for publication, since presumably, you should know that you are not in a truly private place.
IANAL, and I know I'm speaking a little outside my depth--and I don't pretend to support Prince's suit, as I think fans should be able to shoot pictures and videos at concerts, and make and trade audio recordings--but it is my understanding that there is some protection for "private" commercial performances.
The CB App. What's your 20?
If Prince doesn't want the free publicity, give him what he wants and ignore him. Then continue to ignore him when he releases a new album or comes to town. There are plenty of great musicians who aren't so dogmatic and naive about copyright issues.
... song:
You're much better off watching Radiohead perform their own
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nxpblnsJEWM
The DMCA is working exactly as intended. To help stamp out alternative methods of distribution and protect the entrenched publishing industries. The only abuse here was committed by the people who voted for and reelected the politicians who enacted this law. I don't get it. You people wanted near infinite copyright. You want 100 years of war. Well now you'll get it. You have been given what you want, and now you're complaining about it. A more schizophrenic bunch I've never seen. The government is acting on the will of the majority. All this blathering about corporate and government conspiracies is just so much bull. Quitcherbellyachin' and vote them out if you don't like it! That or admit once and for all that majority rule is a miserable failure.
What?
My original point is that lots of crimes are federal offenses, but aren't prosecuted.
I don't know of a single case of perjury being prosecuted for a false DMCA notice. I've seen several stories on this website that talk about people filing DMCA notices in bad faith, but no follow-up regarding any prosecutions.
Your point was that people won't file false DMCA notices because it's a federal crime (and with the implication that it carries a harsh penalty). I was simply pointing out that lots of crimes carry harsh penalties, but aren't prosecuted very often.
Well, there are rights issues concerned with performance. For example you cannot in general perform a work without a license, despite the fact that under your definition, no "copy" was made. Further, Prince may own copyright to his arrangement of the work. Just like if i wrote a song, and performance it, and you recorded it, your work would still be a derivative of my work (my composition, fixed in the form of the sheet music I was using, even though you did not ever see the sheet music), generally requiring a license from me.
But Copyright Law in the US is excessively convoluted, especially in musical, dramatic, or television works. Consider the fact that the copyright act defines the term "gross square feet of space" (referring to square feet of floorspace in an establishment). One can guess what that is used for, but it seems wrong that the copyright act gets into such details. How about the existence of Copyright Royalty Judges?
The fact that this likely involves copyrights in multiple countries (England and the US) makes things even more complicated). Only a Lawyer who specializes in musical copyrights could be very confident about the situation.
Stylish sheet to fix many problems in Slashdot's D3: https://gist.github.com/801524
That all depends on whether fan recordings are expressly permitted at Cochella. If I sneak a video camera into a performance of The Philadelphia Orchestra performing the Brandenburg Concertos, I don't get to tell the orchestra to piss off just because the piece was written by Bach.
Sadly though, the companies who have already commited such acts (false takedown notices) have not yet (to my knowledge) been charged with perjury, nor have any penalties been levied for time/labor spent or other damages to the parties who were "required" to take down the content.
Perjury is more likely to be a crime than petty copyright infringement, which is far more often treated as a tort.For now... keep in mind, as many forget here, there is a Criminal Copyright Infringement law -it's just not often used (but has successfully been used recently - either by the MPAA or RIAA - forget which, but you can find it on Groklaw and here).
The next step by the **AA and others, will be to try prosecuting under both angles (civil and criminal)... Winning them penalties and jailing miscreants.
StarTrekPhase2 - The Five Year Mission Continues!
The DMCA actually encourages you to *NOT* verify the request is valid. As a service provider, the DMCA take-down basically says that if you take down the content immediately, you will be protected from being sued by the copyright holder.
You, as a service provider, probably cannot verify the claim in the time required by the take-down request. And if you do verify it and decide not to take it down, you are now opening up yourself to being sued.
So why doesn't someone send a butt-load of take-down requests to youtube? The reason is that a take-down notice requires you to swear that you have the rights to pursue legal action on the named copyrights.
If you submit a DMCA take-down for a work that you do not have copyright for, and the actual holder decides it's worth them to sue, they can get damages plus legal fees. So it's really a crap-shoot as far as whether someone actually *WILL* decide it's worth it to sue.
Now, if you do that against thousands of youtube videos, chances are that you will get sued, particularly as these people could all join forces and bring a class action suit.
Remember, the DMCA take-down notice is *SUPPOSED* to be used to say "I'm filing a suit against this guy, but having his material up is causing me harm, so you need to take it down pronto and that way you won't be open to being sued as well.
How it's *ACTUALLY* being used is to say "I want you to remove this other person's content, here's a document you'll recognize that has some legal weight behind it.
Over the last year my company has gotten two DMCA takedown notices. Neither one, as far as I can tell, actually had any intention of filing suit.
One was e-mailed to us requesting that a University site we host be removed. An Australian CMS software vendor hired someone to send out all these take-down notices. After some discussion with this person filing the take-down (it wasn't filled out properly, in a few small ways) he said he was contacting us because he couldn't contact the site owner. "You weren't able to contact a University?!?" "Well, actually, I didn't try, I can't afford to make international calls." Yes, this place filed a DMCA take-down to save the cost of a phone call.
Turns out the University *DID* have a license to the software, and had even contacted the vendor recently asking about whether they needed to renew the license and were told "no".
The other one was from a site that sells something, filed against a site we host which does reviews -- and had an unfavorable review. They claimed a copyright on the review. As far as we know, this place has never filed a suit.
This system is *BROKEN*.
Sean
So what you're saying is it would have to be a sustained barrage of takedown requests. If YouTube has to take it down when I request, and put it back up when the owner requests, then all I have to do is be faster on the 'send' button than he is.
Is this a copyright race condition?
DRM: Terminator crops for your mind!
Prince wanted the Video removed.... In case his fans realised how Crud his music was compared to Radiohead's work...
Laters Sol "Have you found the secrets of the universe? Asked Zebade "I'm sure I left them here somewhere"
I'm sorry, I know this is OT, but just how was remarking that the value may be different for a different type of day taking exception with the GP's statement (in his .sig for those who don't view them), which was that "the number of seconds in a day won't fit into a short, but they will into a long", and hence the wordplay of "it's always a long day."
I mean, to be pedantic I could go for the informational aspect of stating "aha! You're wrong, it's really 86,164.090530833 seconds" based on the Wikipedia entry, and I suppose I just did. :)
But that's still missing the entire point of the programming joke .sig.
The real informative statement here is that a sidereal day is the time it takes the Earth to rotate around its axis, versus the traditional day which is measured by "the motion of the stars" (apparent motion, really). But that seems like "Bad horse!" -- if we keep kicking we might put our feet through its chest.
I feel fantastic, and I'm still alive.
This aspect is what's really interesting. There probably aren't enough data points yet, and we are plainly in a transition period for music distribution technology. The intersting thing to study is to rate artist's approaches to the 'net based on one or more criteria, and attempt to correlate them to success or failure.
I think it would be difficult, if not impossible to come up with any real answer though. First, art is not a commodity so you can't compare Prince as a producer of "1000 barrels of music per day" vs. Radio Head as "1000 barrels of music per day". Secondly, the overall economic climate for musicians may be in decline, and the falling tide may be sinking all the yachts, whether they play on the 'net or not. Whether this decline is due to the the 'net or not is a separate issue that's really rather moot: the cat's out of the bag. The more practical quetion, from the PoV of the musician, is "do I have more to gain by participating in the old model or the new". The answer (pure speculation on my part) probably depends a lot on how you got started. Artists who's careers span the pre-Internet era might be well served by sticking with the old model, whereas new artists might be better off paying less attention to the old model, or maybe even ignoring it totally.
Once we enter a stage where all the currently performing artists started their careers post-Napster, the picture should be more clear.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
A live performance is not subject to federal copyright law until it is "fixed in a tangible medium of expression." And, then, generally the person doing the fixing owns the copyright.
Under federal law, it is illegal to create unauthorized fixations of live works (see 17 U.S.C. 1101). But, doing so doesn't make you a copyright infringer (See 1101(a)). Copyright protection in unfixed works is still left to the states.
The distinction is important because the DMCA only applies to copyright infringement (See 17 U.S.C. 512(c)(1)(C)). Prince's DMCA notice was invalid because Prince doesn't hold a copyright.
Excellent; this is exactly what I've been trying to get at. My understanding was that the "unauthorized fixations of live works" was protected under privacy laws, but the main thing being that I'm sure that there is the possibility that Prince is indeed protected, even if not under the DMCA.
I guess what I've been trying to get at is that Prince might have a legal right to request a take-down; whether it's actually the right thing to do (i.e. is he just being greedy?) or whether he went about it the right way (i.e. should it have been 17 U.S.C. 1101 instead of DMCA?) seem to me to be less-than-germane conversations to be having.
If it's just a technicality, he just needs to fire his lawyer and get one that will cite the correct law. Once the correct law is cited, then whether or not he is being greedy does not affect the outcome of the case.
The first issue is, does he have the legal right? The second is, did he do it correctly? The third--and eventually the most important--is, should he have the right? If the current law is bad, let's do more than just call him greedy; let's change the law. Spending cycles poking holes in his request because it was filed under the wrong statute is as much of a waste of time as questioning his fashion choices.
The CB App. What's your 20?