YouTube Stands Up To IOC Over Free Tibet Video

Ian Lamont writes "The International Olympic Committee has withdrawn a DCMA takedown notice that targeted a two-minute long YouTube video of a Students for a Free Tibet protest at the Chinese consulate in New York. The video shows protesters gathering outside the building at night and projecting images of the Olympic symbol, 'tank man,' Tibetan riot footage and clips of victims of the Chinese police crackdown in Tibet. After receiving the request, YouTube contacted the IOC and asked if it really planned to pursue a claim. The IOC retracted the notice and the video was reposted within hours. Stanford Law School's Center for Internet and Society praised YouTube for 'going out of its way to do more than it's required to do under the law to protect free expression.'"

Comments

Re:Don't be evil

[Repossessed]

While Google's intervention helped, I'm betting it had more to do with alerting the IOC to the insanity of one of its workers. Any real effort on the part of Google would have been, while perhaps right, also a potentially disastrous legal move, given the number of copyright battles where Google is currently relying on a neutral service defense.

Prince Charles was right

[Kupfernigk]

..he once undiplomatically referred to the current Chinese leadership as "ghastly old waxworks." And last week in The Guardian, Marina Hyde suggested that the same description should apply to the IOC and that they deserved one another. When a feudal relic aged around 60, and an upper class British journalist think two sets of people are hopelessly past their sell by date, they must indeed be a long way into the bulging and growing mould stage.

So Google is not so much doing the right thing, but making the tough decision whether to go along with old, obnoxious powerful men who will soon be history, or to keep alongside its demographic.

Re:What did the IOC plan?

[ubernostrum]

Aside from using the logotype (which, in my opinion, was listed as 'fair use'), what exactly did the IOC plan to do with this? And why are they following China's commie propaganda?

There's another explanation, which is that a lot of symbols surrounding the Olympics are trademarked. And, in the US, trademark law requires that you take steps to protect your trademark, or you risk losing some or all of your rights to it. It's debatable how much that has to do with this case, since at least one of the Olympic symbols (the interlocking rings) is protected by a special statute that falls outside normal rules for this sort of thing, but it could be a factor.

Re:I have a mod point...

[houghi]

Somebosy else said:I'm betting it had more to do with alerting the IOC to the insanity of one of its workers.
What if that person was after the Streisant effect. As the Streisant effect is now well known, it could be used to get more attention as well.

Things like this have been done in advertising (at least in Belgium) where one of the adverts in a campaign are slightly offencive to an extreme small part of the population. This becomes a newsitem, everybody hears and talks about it like this one which some people in Belgium thought offencive for women, while this one passed without a problem.
(I am aware of the irony of giving links to ads while talking about viral advertisement)

So could the Streisant effect be used here to 'promote' the free Tibet case?

No Kudos

[stephanruby]

The IOC retracted the notice and the video was reposted within hours.

Google shouldn't have removed the video in the first place. At least, that's what I refused to do when I received an obviously invalid DMCA request for one of my own customers site.

DMCA requests are being sent out like spam. And when I say spam, I mean that they're being sent out by automated scripts with no human supervision whatsoever. And in many documented cases, DMCA requests are being sent out by people who know damn well the DMCA doesn't apply -- but they just want to have some embarrassing materials taken down as quickly as possible.

So if a human looks at it, like a Google employee must have obviously done to tell the IOC about it, and says 'no', it's obviously an invalid DMCA request, then the video shouldn't be removed -- or if it was removed already -- it should be posted back right away -- before the IOC is even contacted.

Now I realize Google is being sued by copyright holders for not being quick enough to respond to them, but we need to sue Google on the other side of the issue to make sure they don't go too far in complying with the legal threats of these automated DMCA requests. If we don't do this, we'll certainly lose our rights to immediate free speech, and *immediate* free speech is important -- or at least it's gaining more importance every single day -- since sites like YouTube often beat out other traditional outlets in getting fresh same-day footage of armed conflicts, rigged elections, and bloody protests.