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EFF Lawyer Calls YouTube ContentID Worse Than DMCA
Richard Koman writes "Warner Music Group is apparently blocking everything YouTube ContentID comes up with as potential infringement. We knew that, but this piece by Jason Perlow shows that they're also spewing out DMCA takedown notices for some pretty clearly fair-use stuff. In my interview with EFF's Fred von Lohmann he talks about how, as bad as the DMCA process is — and it's pretty firmly against fair-use — YouTube's process gives remixers and digital creators even fewer options to assert their right to speak through the fair use of copyright material. While EFF is negotiating with Google and the studios, he suggests that users boycott YouTube if they won't stand up for fair use."
Is there an alternative that's as easy to use and allows embedding of the videos on other sites?
if college students from places that are righting **AA put up fair use items. Then when Warner and others go after these, then put the lawyers against the companies. Once they feel the heat of lawyers, then things will change.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
You can blame the **AA for basically stamping out all competition and then wheeling out ineffective/pay-to-use/DMCA crushing alternatives.
It's called the dispute button. It leads you to a page listing several categories of valid and invalid dispute reasons. One of the valid options is "this use does not require the copyright owner's permission"; select the radio button next to that and you'll get a text box for further information. Put a Twitter-length explanation of why you believe your use is a fair use under the Copyright Act, and you just might win if you have a decent case. I won the only dispute filed against me, which was for the use of "Take Me Out" in this video explaining how it sounds like an Animal Crossing song.
Whatever google does is going to end up being bad, including doing nothing. The online user submitted content arena is a total hell hole. I would not touch that stuff with a 10Gbit/s foot tube.
Learn to play an instrument, write something, film your own original movie. Copy/paste is not art.
You-Tube is losing money, so use their services even more of you don't like them
They give us content at a loss, but make up for it in volume.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Learn to play an instrument, write something
And get sued for accidental plagiarism. George Harrison got sued and lost (Bright Tunes Music v. Harrisongs Music). Michael Bolton got sued and lost (Three Boys Music v. Michael Bolton).
Put a Twitter-length explanation of why you believe your use is a fair use under the Copyright Act, and you just might win if you have a decent case.
Whoa. Hold on there, son. Yes, I agree: there is a strong need to change the laws that define patents, copyrights, trademarks and intellectual property. The current set of laws are either based on older laws or have been designed by the wrong people.
But - and I need you to put down the remote and listen to me, child - there needs to be a balance between inventors, writers and the public. DMCA was written too broadly by the entertainment industry. Another hurdle that hurts the common man is the costs involved in getting a patent, copyright or trademark are at times higher than the expected revenue to be derived by having a patent, copyright or trademark.
Fair use also needs to be protected. If a video of a child's music recital is taken down because of copyright laws, then those laws have gone too far. The song "Happy Birthday" apparently is still copyrighted, but the public is allowed to sing the song at special events without paying anything to the copyright holder.
Art and music are vital parts of culture, the artists should have credit and benefit of sales; but, the public has a right to experience art and music without undue burdens that treat the enjoyment as a commodity. Fucking kids!
=Smidge=
Is it just my observation, or is eldavojohn an idiot?
... to the tune of 470M per annum according to Credit Suisse analyst Spencer Wang, maybe we should pile on instead of boycotting them. :)
That people expect a service that provides easily searchable, accessible, and embeddable content, to fight your crusade for you. Why SHOULD they fight fair use battles if that wasn't their implied mission from square one? I know that if I was the owner/operator of YouTube I'd do everything that I had to do to protect my business from being sued by DMCA happy lawyers.
You also have to keep in mind that crusaders of Fair Use are in the Minority, because your average Joe doesn't even know what the DMCA is or ever even heard of the RIAA, and THAT is the audience a huge site like YouTube is focusing on.
I agree that it sucks, and that the DMCA sucks and is abused, but you can't expect everyone to chance everything to fight something that garners No common interest among the majority of it's users population.
Write em' an e-mail, and gripe to them, just don't expect anything to happen at the speed you'd like to see.
"This is the value of a summer spent and a winter earned"
...he suggests that users boycott YouTube...
Good idea. I also suggest making a donation to EFF.
We don't NEED warner's music/movies. With the web, we've developed to a point where independently run shows are more entertaining than big business crap.
Think hak5, collegehumor, derrik comedy, truenuff.
Yeah, honestly, fuck warner. If they don't want to share, they don't get to be part of the future.
As seen Apr. 9, 2009, 6:30 AM on http://www.businessinsider.com/is-youtube-doomed-2009-4
If you really want to hurt Google, then post more and raise their costs. A boycott right now would actually help them balance the books and make it easier for them to justify continuing the service.
They don't like YouTube, they don't like Obama... does the EFF like anything?
Seriously, write a press-release about how much you love little puppies or something. Your grumpiness is making me depressed.
It breaks my pluginses, my precious!
So the EFF says that YouTube ContentID is worse than DMCA, and that Obama's wiretapping defense is worse than Bush's...
EFF: Tomorrow's Proclamations Will Be Worse Than Today's.
once said "There is no fair use to take something that doesn't belong to you." Evidently, his corrupt spirit continues to rule the dark kingdom of Mediopolis. Fair use is a legal right, at least within U.S. law, but it appears that corporate media copyright conglomerates will make you fight for that right, each and every you exercise it, until you give up.
Welcome to the Panopticon. Used to be a prison, now it's your home.
Hahahaaaaa. YouTube? Whats that? I've already forgotten how to use it. Be sure to let us know if the situation changes, otherwise I'll have to stick with Xtube.
Doesn't every YouTube video that is entirely quiet violate copyrights on 4'33"? If so, then the copyright holder of that 'song' could dispute many videos, and potentially open the path to new revenue by getting all those copyright pirates to buy a license for the use of silence.
I know there are a great many video editing tools out there, but here is how to do it in Sony Vegas.
The theory behind this is simple: music operates in a key. It's a "baseline" set of notes that are usually pleasing when played together. What people usually don't understand is that any song can be played in any key, and it will sound basically the same. When you hear the pitch shift in effect the first time, the song will sound "wrong", but unless you are listening to it side-by-side, it won't matter.
YouTube scans audio using small pieces of WMG songs as "fingerprints". They naturally assume that the songs they are looking for are in the same key as the original recording. By shifting the pitch a quarter step, the audio track will be impossible to match to their fingerprint. Keep in mind that this is a "workaround", that is, you could not rerecord a song in a different key and claim that it doesn't infringe on the original's copyright. But your YouTube videos are safe!
Good luck finding the Pitch Shift feature in your video editing software. It's relatively simple, and should be available in most.
"I swear, under penalty of perjury, that the information in the notification is accurate and that I am the copyright owner or am authorized to act on behalf of the owner of an exclusive right that is allegedly infringed."
IANAL, but it seems obvious to me that misrepresenting something that is clearly fair use as something that isn't means that the notification was NOT accurate. Therefore, the law firm representing the copyright holder (and possibly the copyright holder themselves) should have charges of perjury filed against them. I haven't seen the EFF file any countersuits like this yet, though...
I'm the Devil the Windows users warned you about.
We don't NEED warner's music/movies.
Clarification: Time Warner spun off Warner Music Group a few years ago. Now they share nothing but the Warner name and the WB logo, and possibly a favorable license to use WMG music in TW films.
With the web, we've developed to a point where independently run shows are more entertaining than big business crap.
But who will provide the background music for these independent shows?
Yeah, honestly, fuck warner. If they don't want to share, they don't get to be part of the future.
Think of that on the day you go one year into the future. Your family will probably sing you a song copyrighted to Warner/Chappell, a division of WMG.
I'm going to get flamed for this, but under what idea of "Fair Use" would this fall? IANAL but I don't see how this is particularly transformative, and it certainly isn't parody. Pretty much just a guy who got his feelings hurt, sounds like. There is no inalienable right to use copyrighted material, and the law generalizes on the side of the copyright holder, not the user. In general, copyrightable materials are copyrighted unless proven otherwise, not in the public domain unless proven otherwise. And oh by the way, YouTube is private. They're not obligated to post anything, ever. Or as a corrolary, they can pretty much take anything down anytime they want. You don't have to like it, support YouTube, etc., certainly, but the whole idea of having some inalienable right to use a service that costs somebody else money for free, on your own terms, is pretty laughable. I have to say the EFF is starting to look like the ACLU in that their arguments are becoming increasingly bizarre. The EFF should probably recommend that people boycott my media server too, since I don't have any intention of ever letting anyone outside of my immediate family post to it. Fire away ...
Seems like every other video I go to watch is without audio due to 'complaints' and 'infringement'
While this is a good thing for those gameplay videos that involve rap being played at 2x the volume of the game's sounds, it is a BAD THING for things like anime music videos, or parody videos, etc.
Things that should be fair-use are being taken down for 'infringement'.
Perhaps someone could get away with a slander/libel case against whoever called it infringement when it was fair use?
Job? I don't have time to get a job! Who will sit around and bitch about being broke and unemployed then?
Earlier this year when YouTube started silencing user posted videos in response to WB, someone posted this link which did a search for silenced YouTube videos.
Right now there are over 22,000 search results, the highest I've seen it was 300,000+ search results, meaning overall YouTube appear to have silenced over well over 1/3 million videos (and probably then removed most of them).
To do something right, you often have to roll up your sleeves and get busy.
I have to say there's a great deal of creativity and talent involved in the performances of guys like DJ Shadow and Cut Chemist (Brain Freeze, for example), despite the fact that they work with prerecorded media. They're exceptions though.
The worst examples are on youtube. Sticking a bunch of clips from a tv show together and replacing the audio with some annoying song is technically, but barely, creative, and it's certainly not worth anything. Any iTard can do it.
The New York Times reports that many YouTube users have found themselves in the same position as high school sophomore Juliet Weybret, who posted a video of herself playing piano and singing "Winter Wonderland."
Troy McClure: Oh, how darling! That is one swinging rendition, Juliet! ... but my grandma and mom play this song for the whole family every Christmas ...
Troy McClure: But today I'm going to teach you the magic of copyrights! Do you know that you're violating the law?
*Juliet shakes her head*
Troy McClure: GOOD! That just might hold up as a defense in court if you look a little more sweeter and innocent. But your fate is up to the RIAA to decide!
Troy McClure: You see, Juliet, copyright law is designed to be much too complex for any normal citizen to understand for a reason: so that you, the average citizen, will always lose. Now where did you learn that song from?
Juliet Wybret: My grandma.
Troy McClure: Jackpot! The RIAA loves to interact with the elderly that can't understand technology. I'm certain she paid a handsome sum to play that song for you though otherwise the two of you are thieves. You're not a thief, are you Juliet?
Juliet Wybret: I don't think so.
Troy McClure: Of course not! You see there is a simple law that states for works created after 1978 copyright lasts 70 years after the last surviving author's death (in the case of joint) and works between 1964 and 1977 are the same except were under the old model which had terms of 28 years starting in 1923 but they had to be renewed in order to enjoy the benefit of the full 95 year term after the last surviving author's death. Easy to remember, right? So you see, Winter Wonderland was composed by Felix Bernard who died in 1944 and the lyrics were written by Richard B. Smith who died in 1935. The good news is that you can publicly say the lyrics after 2030 and play the music on piano after 2039! So you're almost there!
Juliet Wybret: Bu
Troy McClure: Easy there, Juliet! The RIAA's got enough ammo against you as it is. Remember, the Senators and Congresspeople who represent you and your interests want it this way so be an American Patriot and embrace the law! They were only thinking of a fair system for you and the artists when they made these laws. See you next time!
My work here is dung.
Earlier today I had an urge to listen to Devo's Jocko Homo from their self-produced movie. Found two copies, only to have the sound removed because a record label was claiming copywrite on the music. Hello, the music is within a movie which is copywrited by Devo Productions, how can you claim to control what is within their own movie?!?
Karma Whoring for Fun and Profit.
Problem is, your dismay has been forseen.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyberpunk_2020
The RP gamer crowd knew the net would be commercial, even before we properly understood it all.
Yes the book missed a few things, but what's alarming me is the MegaCorporation mentality is right on track, on time.
Reg. User posting Anon because I modded something else up to someone who deserved a point.
Farmer Tim: In singling out Mr. Bolton, are you aiming for a (Score:5, Funny), trying to make a reference to Office Space or perhaps to some obscure film that I haven't seen?
Consider this: Based on the properties of the western musical scale, there's a significant chance that any song you write will infringe another song's hook. I seem to remember this analysis.
The EFF always slips into high melodrama mode when they need to raise funds. Slashdot has served as one of their principal PR platforms perennially. It's pathetic and smarmy, but it's nothing new.
Problem with fair use is that it's a very vague concept (at least in the USA) to begin with. RIAA is even claiming that it's not a right, but an affirmative defense. So anybody can claim that X is not a fair use of Y without committing perjury in any way.
The Raven
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oHg5SJYRHA0
This started with the cult of the Baroque composer.
Couldn't have someone loaned the composer a few bucks?
*shakes head* When did people actually start believing that crap that 'Fair Use' had anything to do with 'Fair'. Or 'Use', for that matter.
The U.S. government cannot deny you the right to carry a firearm to work, but the company you work for may.
The U.S. government cannot prevent you from filling your yard with yard gnomes, but your housing association may.
The U.S. government cannot force you to stop drag racing, but the company that hosts your life insurance policy may.
The U.S. government cannot prevent you from sharing particular content online, but the site that you use for hosting the content may.
In each example, you are entering an agreement with the company in the example. The agreement can set any terms it wishes. You have the choice of not signing it.
"Fair Use" is extremely vague. I believe it was vague on purpose, so that courts, politicians, and lawyers would become more necessary, but that is beside the point. YouTube realizes that the line is extremely gray, so they are conservative with what they allow. How do people not understand this?
Free unix account: freeshell.org
How many Libraries of Congress is that?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Synchronization of music from source A with video from source B is not "fair use". Especially when big chunks of a song, or even the entire song, are copied.
There's free royalty-free music available. There's vast amounts of cheap techno. Out of copyright classical. Garage bands. Or, in many cases, you can call up a minor label and buy a license. I've done that.
Quit whining.
"There is no inalienable right to use copyrighted material"
There sure is. The right of property. I assume that you are talking about US law, given the article to which you are commenting.
The Bill of Rights prohibits the federal government from depriving any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.
A CD, book or DVD is simply property and you can use it however you want.
Of course, you are talking about Copyright, which, in this case refers to the right to make a copy of the property in question. Since the Bill of Rights trumps Copyright, Copyright cannot restrict what you do with it, outside of the (hopefully narrow) proscriptions specified and justified in the Copyright Act.
So, there is an inalienable right. (Well, technically, I guess you COULD argue that the Bill of Rights is not inalienable, but it should be so considered in the US).
What we are talking about is then the scope (or restrictions) placed on Copyright, and the reactions of Companies to overly broad interpretations of Copyright as promoted by cartels and not creators.
Just another "Cubible(sic) Joe" 2 17 3061
Google's calculator appears not to support tweets or libraries of congress as units of information. But Wikipedia says one Library of Congress is 20 TB of text. Under this definition, one tweet (140 bytes) equals 7 * 10^(-12) LoC.
...which clearly had no copyright infringement besides mentioning an auto system cleaning product. I made the video myself. No answer was given to me, only that I had a hit against my account and if I got 3, it would be deleted. There's obviously no way to battle their decision. It sucks.
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
... the fair use of a copyrighted work, including such use by reproduction in copies ... for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research, is not an infringement of copyright. In determining whether the use made of a work in any particular case is a fair use the factors to be considered shall include --
(1) the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes;
(2) the nature of the copyrighted work;
(3) the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and
(4) the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.
The fact that a work is unpublished shall not itself bar a finding of fair use if such finding is made upon consideration of all the above factors.
Almost all minor sampling should fall under criticism/comment or least should be exempted in some other way. Of course many people (including the courts) disagree with me. Oh well. Just because we have asinine laws, doesn't make them morally right. Searh for "remix culture" if you want to understand the other side's arguments.
P.S. We certainly have a right to petition our corporate overlords. It's a tired argument to say the corporations can do what they want and we should bend over for a good dicking without saying a word about it. Sure, they have many rights, but they also massively influence society and are therefore subject to at least some accountability to those people they affect.
P.P.S. The ACLU is awesome. Those who believe in true freedom should support the ACLU. It's weird to me that somehow to a lot of people freedom is merely the provisions of the 2nd amendment (which I support), and all the other Rights be damned when marginalized people say or worship something the first group doesn't like, or when a marginalized group wants freedom that runs counter to traditional, straight-laced society.
I can't give it a proper write-up because I didn't take enough notes while I did it, and once I've submitted the dispute, I no longer have the UI available to me to take screenshots. But seriously, it's not that hard. If you can write a good fair use rationale for English Wikipedia, you can write one for YouTube.
Just host a torrent to an Xvid video. There's a reason I don't want to watch anime on YouTube. Several reasons actually.
Being a DJ is far more than playing music for people
The "celebrity DJ" thing is overrated. I've heard way too many DJs, and the average level of performance is slightly above an iPod Shuffle.
It would be a fun project to build a fully automated club DJ system. Use webcams to monitor the dance floor, and a LK tracker (there's a free one in OpenCV) to track moving people. Once you have people movement vectors, count the dancers (ignoring stationary people). Also, take the beat from the audio and correlate it with the movement vectors to see how many dancers have picked up on the beat. Now you have an evaluation metric.
There are already automated DJ mixing systems which can do good transitions between songs. All you need now is a playlist.
So use a machine learning system to evaluate which songs and pairs of songs result in good evaluation metrics. Feed in a big playlist, and let the crowd tell you what to play. If a song empties the dance floor, abort that one and try something else.
On top of this, a strategy module to put in a slow song once in a while to build bar traffic might be needed. A connection into the POS system to monitor drink sales would help.
This would be an improvement over 90% of the DJs out there, including some of the "big names".)
I don't think you should get flamed for this. I agree with you that this particular case in the article (soundtrack for a slideshow) is a poor example of fair use at best.
There are four considerations for fair use in US copyright law:
The case holds up well on points (1) and (4), it is not for profit and is for a very limited audience. On (2) and (3), it's used without modification and is not changed enough to be transformative (even if the audio quality was degraded), so it completely fails these points.
However, There are plenty of other cases where most if not all aspects of fair use are clearly present, but the content was removed anyway. In one case, WMG ordered the takedown of a video of a girl singing 'Winter Wonderland'. Also, numerous AMVs (Anime Music Videos) have been taken down that provide parody of and artistic commentary on the original subject materials. It is this blanket, cluster-bomb approach that is the problem. It's completely unfair (and illegal) for content holders to tread on our fair use rights, even if it is in the name of the supposedly noble cause of fighting piracy.
I'm the Devil the Windows users warned you about.
"People writing songs that voices never share
And no one dared
Disturb the sound of silence."
Simon and Garfunkel, 1966
They saw it coming!
Jason Perlow wrote quite a rant without about fair use without understanding how it works. Simply lowering the sound quality of copyrighted recordings doesn't give him the right to redistribute those songs in their entirety. Using a short clip of one or two songs might have been okay.
I agree that what he did was reasonable from a common sense perspective, and that it was silly and pointless of Warner to issue a takedown request for the video in question. Unfortunately, common sense has NOTHING to do with copyright law and the DMCA.
... buy music that comes with clear permission to use the music you buy on places like YouTube.
Disclaimer: My only association with Magnatune is being a happy customer.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
http://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0135.html
What posters seem to be missing is posting a video on youtube isn't self publishing. Youtube can block a video if it wants to even if said video is legal. It has no obligation to post everything submitted.
Facing a $1billion dollar lawsuit before content ID, Google it's self said they were going to go beyond their legal obligations.
This isn't P2p networks, it's a private site protecting it's assets
Youtube doesn't have a monopoly on video. If I want music videos, I go to Roxwel or Blastro. There are plenty of sites that specialize in a certain kind of video and do it well and legally.
The funniest case of this is a youtube video "Led Zeppelin's 'Original' Songs" made comparing LedZep songs with other songs. It made a case for repeated plagiarism, and yet, WMG has effectively blocked it. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BCMDR0yrxMw
Ridiculous!
puts his story about this on the net under a CC license. Read it.
"switchtovimeo"
Because I did and actually found it worth paying to use. Even the free package is okay.
Youtube, no matter what they say, does *NOT* display in HD. I'm on a 32" 1080p monitor and I'm about 6 feet away. I can guaran-damn-tee you that "HD" is *NOT.* Taking a forced screenshot through my framebuffer and then counting the pixelated blocks gives me a resolution of 640x272. Perfect 16:9 widescreen, NO HIGH DEFINITION. Totally false advertising.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Here're few absolutely non-falsifiable statements for you:
- There's no such thing as "fair use"
- There's no such thing as "original art"
- There's no such thing as "original invention"
As for TFA, case and point of YAGF.
Nice argument re: the bill of rights, but it's fantasy. Retrieving something online doesn't make it your property, although clearly that's the point of contention. There's no legal basis for the idea that by posting something online I automatically give away property rights to it. Again, copyright protects the copyright holder and puts the onus for defending fair use on the user. The gray area falls on the side of the copyright holder. It seems you don't agree that should be the case, an opinion that you're certainly entitled to. Your intepretation of copyright law is very broad, and very convenient. Unfortunately, it's not borne out by much legal precedent, nor is the EFF's (in this case).