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."

Comments

Re:Alternative?

[seeker_1us]

An alternative is giving the giant middle finger to the RIAA and using ONLY independent music in your YouTube videos. Go creative commons, go attribution only, etc, and fully credit those artists so people can discover them and realize they can get good or better music without the RIAA

Is there a solution

[nicolas.kassis]

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.

Re:Accidental plagiarism

[NeutronCowboy]

Ding Ding Ding! I had a situation at work where people used Happy Birthday as a melody for an iPhone music app. They were shocked to find out that it is copyrighted. The problem is that there is so much content out there that you can argue with just enough credibility to get into court that creative work A infringes on random creative work B. Despite all efforts by creators of A to be original. Not sure where I heard it, but this was one advice to future creatives types that stuck with me: "If you want to make a movie, do it in an empty white room with your two closest friends. Everything else opens you up for copyright claims."

The point is that culture thrives on copying, modifying and playing with existing content. The harder corps will try to come down on small infringement, the less people will like the overall idea of copyright itself. One possible outcome is that WarnerBros gets everyone to turn into mindless consumers. Another possible outcome is that people get so pissed off that they manage to convince their congress critters to change copyright law in their favor. And I'm not sure the former is more likely than the latter.