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Nielsen Sends Wikipedia DMCA Takedown For Station Descriptions
RockMFR writes "A DMCA takedown notice sent by Nielsen Media Research to the Wikimedia Foundation has resulted in the deletion of over 300 pages on the English Wikipedia. The pages were 'templates' and categories that listed television stations within various geographical markets in the United States. Discussion of the deletions has focused on whether this type of information can actually be copyrighted, though the content of the takedown notice have not been made public."
are not copyrightable. There is no "question" here.
Mod me flamebait if you want, but I thought Wikipedia was all about information being free. For having the tendency to cave so easily, makes me wonder what kind of people are really running the place.
... should be a criminal offense. And a serious one, too.
Actually, the ability to force someone to cease speech on simple "say-so", without ever having visited court first, should never have become law in the first place. I believe DMCA takedown notices will eventually be determined to be a classic case of unbridled "prior restraint".
I believe that in some cases, however, compilations can. In that case - though I could be wrong - specific arrangement of facts could be considered copyrighted if it were copied verbatim, like OCR'ing a phonebook or something of the sort.
If memory serves cases have gone for and against this though, so it's not that clear-cut.
As noted on the admin page, "The entire categorization schema that was in place was copyrighted by Nielsen and could not be used under our GFDL license," so it wasn't just that the information was used, but that it was copied pretty much directly.
The entire categorization schema that was in place was copyrighted by Nielsen and could not be used under our GFDL license.
the DMCA notice included at least the use of Nielsen's 'Designated Market Area' (DMA) classification system. As our Media market article says, Nielsen coined the term and holds a trademark on it. The takedown notice may have included more, but I think it is fairly clear that much at least was an issue. Hence
It looks like they used a categorizing scheme originally produced and copyrighted by Nielsen, which could warrant a legit takedown request - the complete takedown of the pages (especially such a large number of them), however, seems to be overkill.
That you can get a copyright on something like that, to me, seems ridiculous, but then again, I don't make money by selling people their own production numbers back to them.
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Apparently Toledo TV has been undeleted. (Mirror in case it goes again.)
How in God's name is an association of TV station titles to markets in which they can be received copyrightable?
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I get marketing research phone calls from Neilsen subsidiaries doing surveys. If I have time, I do them. Now I'll tell them *NO*. You can't have it both ways, Nielsen. I suggest other readers do the same.
They also mailed me a survey when I bought a new car. My prize was 'a chance' to win some petrol. An hour of my time for 'a chance'. They seem to have an inflated view of their own self-worth.
In this episode: A marketing research company learns about public relations.
Not sure what information the pages had on them, but you can get a lot of technical information on stations from the FCC. Including the the exact lat/long of their antenna, it's height above sea level, output in watts, etc. http://www.fcc.gov/mb/video/tvq.html You can also easily get programming information at tv.yahoo.com. I'm not sure what Neilsen is trying to "protect" here.
The Google Cache is different, at least for now. The key difference: The words "Nielson DMA#."
The Internet Archive also has older versions.
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I made a promise to myself that if I found the information there, I was going to hit the donate button and send $346,217.12.
Alas, I didn't find the information.
We don't know the whole story but this much is being guessed about:
Nielson divides the country into "Market areas" some of which are stand-alone metro areas and some of which are combinations of cities which may contain "creative content." For example, if the metro areas A, B, C, and D are in close proximity, you can combine them in dozens of ways, ranging from lumping them all together into 1 market area, having 4 separate market areas, or one of several combinations of 2 or 3 market areas. Doing this across the country creates a list which is potentially copyrightable because it contains the creative thought that went into deciding just where to combine the metro areas into the market areas.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
I have one thing to say to the dumbasses that filed this DMCA notice:
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This DMCA notice now makes me worry about my own site. It uses the same list, which is in fact the same list the FCC uses in its own rules and regulations. I've started investigating alternative listing methods, but none of them make sense because they all organize their "target city" by DMA! Listing by state is stupid because a station in New Jersey always targets New York or Philadelphia. Without being able to use the Nielsen DMA, the whole system of listing stations goes to hell.
Maybe it's just me, but I don't like the FCC making rules that cannot be read because some company has a copyright on it. Examples:
When digital TV stations were signing on, the FCC said commercial stations in the top 100 markets have to be on the air by 05/01/2002. If you don't have permission to look at Nielsen's "copyrighted" list, then how would a station be able to know what market they're in? Not every station is subscribed to Nielsen's data.
In 47CFR73.622(f)(5), the FCC lists an exception that allows stations to expand coverage to match "the largest station in the market." How do you know which stations are in your market if you're not allowed to look at Nielsen's market boundaries?
This whole thing rubs me the wrong way, and makes me nervous.
This only demonstrates to me that laws such as the DMCA (given their extremely wide scope and the relative inability of any USian citizen to challenge a (good or bad) takedown notice without spending a fortune on lawyers and court fees) could only have been passed by a body that only has the interests of commercial corporations at heart.
Surely information such as the reception range of various television stations quite rightly is public information.
DMCA notices shouldn't have been needed for this. Simply going in and making the requisite modifications, or asserting that certain information is copyrighted, and then citing proof of copyright should have been all that is required.
And besides that, isn't the Neilson corporation about producing viewer statistics not about regulating the reception areas of the transmitters for various television stations?
Whether Nielsen is a governmental entity or not is quite irrelevant here. The DMCA notice being used to restrain free speech takes its power from the threat of legal penalty which would be inflicted by the government.
Now it may be true that this notice isn't valid, and therefore doesn't have the actual force of the government behind it (the article is sort of short on details there so I don't know), but the fact that the DMCA is constructed such that companies have every incentive to obey take down notices whether valid or not means that the law, and hence the government is responsible for the restraint of free speech, at least indirectly.
OK, having actually READ TFA and some other postings about this topic, here's what this appears to be about.
Wikipedia wanted to list all the TV stations for each major television market.
But how do you define what stations are in a given "market"? For example, does the "New York City" market area include Newark, NJ? What about Trenton, NJ? Does it extend into Connecticut? If so, how far?
Ultimately, the way you group a set of locations into regions is somewhat arbitrary, and there are a lot of ways to do it. For example, the US Census Bureau has one set of metropolitan areas they use to report major statistics. Nielsen has their own grouping of cities (and therefore stations located in those cities) into markets.
Nielsen's grouping is not identical to other public groupings like the US Census bureau's. It's what they feel are the appropriate groupings for television advertising marketing, since that's who their customers are. And they put work into developing and refining their classification scheme.
What appears to have happened is that Wikipedia wanted to list television station, and wanted to organize that list of stations by Nielsen market area. Heck, take a look at the delete log in the original post--they were even calling their organization "Nielsen markets."
Nielsen's position, as I understand it, is that Nielsen's mapping of cities (and therefore stations) into markets is their own unique work, which is not public domain, and it's not OK for Wikipedia to use Nielsen's mappings without their permission. If Wikipedia had used a different organizational scheme for the same data (e.g. US Census metro areas), Nielsen likely wouldn't have had an issue with it.
Please note I'm not trying to play apologist for Nielsen or the DCMA here--I'm not a huge fan of the DCMA or US definitions on what's "copyrightable." However, I do prefer looking at a case on it's individual merits to knee jerk "anyone using the DCMA must be evil!" arguments.
No, everyone should be outraged that this seems to mean that facts are copyrightable.
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You can disagree with me all you like, but modding my comment as "redundant" was simply wrong. It was a valid and original reply to the person who posted.
lets add a fifth category. failure to differentiate between copywrite and copyright. I suggest reading this article.
Offtopic, perhaps, but if a categorization schema can be copyrighted and summarily suppressed by Neilsen in this way, with the switch to digital in progress in the U.S., what's to prevent somebody from copyrighting and similarly suppressing transmissions themselves based upon a particular encryption algorithm used in the act of transmission? Seems like it would set the stage for blanket censorship of the media at a fairly fundamental level, and that IS worrisome. At the very least, it could require visual media to be offered on a subscription basis only, which kinda negates the concept of free speech, doesn't it?
Just for this, if Nielsen ever asks to track my household television viewing, I'm going to feed them a pack of lies!
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> Wikipedia and most other website owners will comply with a DMCA notice
> regardless of whether or not it is valid because they don't care
> and is the simplest thing to do.
No, they will comply because doing so gives them, via other provisions of the DMCA, a modicum of immunity to monetary liability for copyright infringement.
> Maybe they agree and took it down because they personally recognise
> that the copyright belongs to Nielsen?
Er, probably not. The DCMA provides for non-judicial takedowns, but it also gives organizations which acquiesce to those takedowns a large amount of immunity to monetary damages. Practically everyone prefers to have to go through the rigmarole of removing the content, filing a counterclaim, and reinstating the content, in order to greatly lower financial exposure.
BTW, do you really think that Nielsen owns a copyright on the list of TV stations available in the Toledo, Ohio area?
IANAL etc. etc. but the whole point of the takedown provisions was to provide an expedited removal process that didn't require the courts. Last time I read the DMCA it seemed like the process was pretty straightforward: you send a takedown notice to the site that informs them someone posted infringing copies of your material on their site, and you include all your relevant contact information. The site takes down the material and informs the poster they've done so. The poster can then request the material be restored if they provide full contact information for themselves, to be forwarded on to you. Now you have contact information for the infringer and you can file suit if you care to.
Everybody gets up in arms over the DMCA takedown notice process, but this actually seems like a pretty reasonable policy in an otherwise really bad law. By providing expedited takedown, sites limit their liability for hosting infringing material. Anyone who receives a takedown can request the material be restored, at which point there's no counter-counter-takedown notice, it just moves completely to the courts. Sites do not get caught in the battle between copyright holder and infringer, unless they want to be.
Nothing is stopping a site from ignoring the takedown notice if they know it's bogus. The biggest downside is that contesting the notice requires losing anonymity, which leaves open the possibility of abusing the process specifically to find anonymous critics.
It's not a perfect process, but I think actually this is one part of the law where they were at least trying to do the right thing. (I'd bet that the copyright cartels didn't want any counter-notice process.)
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