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Universal Uses DMCA To Get Bad Lip Reading Parody Taken Down
Joren writes "Bad Lip Reading is an independent producer known for anonymously parodying music and political videos by redubbing them with his humorous attempts at lip-reading, such as Everybody Poops (Black Eyed Peas) and Gang Fight (Rebecca Black). According to an interview in Rolling Stone, he creates entirely new music from scratch consisting of his bad lip readings, and then sets them to the original video, often altering the video for humorous effect and always posting a link to the original off which it is based. Although his efforts have won the respect of parody targets Michael Bublé and Michelle Bachman, not everyone has been pleased. Two days ago, Universal Music Group succeeded in getting his parody Dirty Spaceman taken down from YouTube, and despite BLR's efforts to appeal, in his words, 'UMG essentially said "We don't care if you think it's fair use, we want it down."' And YouTube killed it. So does this meet the definition of parody as a form of fair use? And if so, what recourse if any is available for artists who are caught in this situation?"
...and argue that it is, which a private individual rarely has the resources to do.
Got to love the legal system.
Kickstarter Lawsuits. We finally have a solution!
SUE ON BROTHERS.
They invoked the "we don't care what you think" and everyone knows that the founding fathers added that clause to the Constitution, so that all of your rights and all of the land's laws could be circumvented with that clever dismissive phrase.
These are the kinds of laws we get when we let companies (via their lobbyists) write their own legislation.
Send a letter to your National and State Congress critters, the local paper(s) Op-Ed, the local paper(s) when the the EFF and any others you can think of. Don't exaggerate, send copies of any proof that you have. Write up your own letter and send it to them and You Tube\Google claiming they have violated your 4th Amendment Rights and send it registered, return receipt requested. Not that they'll care, but at least you can prove you have complained to them.
AC
And YouTube killed it
Yes, but it's not YouTubes fault. They have to take it down by law. Blame your politicians and ridiculous copyright laws - not YouTube.
This must not stand!
Repost the video!
I don't know the meaning of the word 'don't' - J
The politically correct ones. Their asshole is where their mouth should be. It's also why it's more politically correct (in the music industry) to kiss their ass then to kiss their mouth, especially after they've been talking shit, which would be rather unpleasant.
Unfortunately parodies remind them that it's not normal to have an asshole where your mouth should be, unless they are ass kissing, then it's perfectly normal, except they don't like being reminded that they are ass kissing or that they are a walking talking parody of themselves, a bunch of walking talking assholes.
Now that would make for an interesting parody video.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
Can't he just file a counter-notice? I though in that case Youtube would be obligated to put it back up and instead force UMG to sue if they don't agree?
I didn't see the video that was taken down, but I don't believe that the videos I did see would meet the legal definition of parody. To be a parody, you have to make fun of the original work. These videos use the original work to make a joke about other things, which is legally defined as satire and is not protected as fair use.
Weird Al claims to get approval before every song that he does.
Sometimes I'm not sure if these people are just ignorant to the Streisand effect, or are actively trying to use it to gain publicity for themselves generally or whatever the parody is using as inspiration or source material.
The videos don't seem to be down. I just watched it.
http://www.youtube.com/user/BadLipReading#p/c/48076365A788CC3F/6/bQOJwDMZMXw
I just checked it. http://www.youtube.com/user/BadLipReading
It's really funny but not as funny as Day Job Orchestra.
This will persist as long as people keep UMG and others in business.
Why is ANYONE giving money to them any more, given all the shit they have pulled over the last years? Seriously... it boggles the mind. Just stop giving them money, and they'll go away!
Actually, it's not quite so simple. If you post anything people upload, then you are covered by the Safe Harbour provisions of the DMCA. If someone files a take-down notice, then you are obliged to remove it, until the original poster produces a counter notice. If you then restore it, then the copyright owner has to get a court to agree that it is infringement (by suing the original poster). If you don't, then you may be deemed to be taking an active role in copyright enforcement and lose your safe harbour status. In short, not restoring it can open Google up to more liability than restoring it.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
You'll probably simply moderate me down for this, but technically UMG is correct, because he is using their video.
He would be fine if he created his own video.
The parody defense would probably mean he could use their texts if altered to be a parody, but that's it.
He could try to strike a deal with UMG, for example "You allow me to use your video, then I allow you to use mine".
And if UMG refuses, it would be ok to bad-mouth them.
This isn't even a case of copyright law doing something that it isn't intended to do.
The only decent stand to take against what happened, if you want to go that far, would be to argue that all information once released should be free. That may be a reasonable stand, but it isn't how we handle things today at all.
Hey don't blame me, IANAB
but geez, the original raw material is utter bs.
Hire an attorney, spend lots of money getting to court and then winning.
But by then you have been drained of your measly little life savings and have noting left to show for it except a hollow 'i won'.
The media giants have won this one They bought the legislation and are going to use it. The only way out is to repeal the DMCA and pave the way for winners in these situations ( and other frivolous suits ) to recoup ALL their losses and a *hefty* fine placed on the industry that goes to the winner.
Make them be damned sure they cant lose in court and be able to defend their actions of suing old ladies to the judge..
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Has YouTube changed their procedures for dealing with DMCA takedowns? I had this same experience with a video for my nonprofit and once I asserted my willingness to be sued YouTube restored the video. Their position at the time (and apparently still their position per their site) was that it was up to the rights holder to sue under DMCA --- not for a contributor to sue to have content restored. The process I followed is here: http://www.youtube.com/t/copyright_counter and although my video was down for a few months it was put back up and is still up years later. This is the way that I believe DMCA was designed to work and YouTube does a pretty good job of balancing this process. YouTube does not make any determination about if the content is "fair use" or not - they instead put the onus on the one asserting infringement to take legal action. Seems reasonable to me - and at least in my case - their process worked.
IANAL but did graduate from law school a few months ago.
JAGga.me ----> Producing video games addressing emotional health and wellness issues affecting teens.
Add this to the list of problems with the 1% that need to be corrected. The entire issue of intellectual property needs to be overhauled in the Constitution 2.0.
Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.
File a DMCA Counter Notice.
This establishes to Google your exact name, filing address, and a statement (notarized, I believe) that you have the right to be doing what you are doing. Fair Use is one of those rights, although the first thing an attorney will tell you is that fair use is extraordinarily vague. Before filing this thing you may wish to consult with an attorney. Defending yourself against a lawsuit, which the DMCA Counter Notice will surely enable them to file, will cost a $15,000 simply to get started.
C//
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I hope he had ads on them.
that way he could sue them for lost revenue, using some RIAA calculations he should be awarded about 75 million.
So this guy uploads full length parodies (3min+), isn't there a limit on such things like 30 seconds, otherwise it's no longer fair use?
The most common DMCA problem on Youtube is for people who upload their original video/creation but used copyrighted soundtrack. When found, those videos get taken down. BadLipReading is just doing the opposite: stole copyrighted video frames but is using his own original soundtrack. This is still wrong and I think he is a Youtube partner (adverts next to the video), i.e. making money from this.
I thought that in these situations you can file a DMCA counter notice with the service hosting content. It appears that he did this, but YouTube still removed his content, which is unfortunate. His post is pretty low on details. It really is too bad we mere mortals cannot afford to got to court on these issues. UMG committed perjury here, plain and simple. And it appears that with the DMCA perjury is committed on a regular basis. Very sad indeed. In short, what a mess. Ironic that Michelle Bachmann doesn't have a problem with his parodies, as she's a politician quite likely to pander to the corporate machine.
I still have a bad mark on my Youtube account from making a short parody video of something once which was flagged as a copyright violation by somebody. The only way to get this off of my record is to send some DMCA formal counter notice to the original owner, which is wayyyy more effort than a lot of the Youtube videos that get marked are worth fooling with, and also requires you to give your real name and everything. Besides, in my case, that person is not only long gone, but obviously is not going to give a crap about me having a bad mark on my account in the first place since I bet they're responsible for it being there.
Youtube makes it way too easy for people to be jerks. They didn't even check the video in my case, or they would have seen it was blatant parody with very little source material. I ended up removing two other videos I had spent a lot of time editing which contained content that could be disputed because I simply can't risk losing my whole account from such bullshit. I can't imagine what kind of crap that people with professional channels must have to deal with on Youtube. And look at how many of them have even had their accounts shut down occasionally from it, even if just temporary. If those people are Youtube partners (which some of them have been), that's costing them money.
And didn't I hear before that some company was filing copyright claims against people for posting video game footage now too? If you go around killing all the Let's Play and video game reviews, then half of Youtube will be gone overnight.
So basically, fuck companies hiding behind the DMCA to protect their image or content or whatever ridiculous excuse they want to use. They only encourage me to want to pirate them out of spite. It's about like what happened to Metallica several years ago. Their music sucks, but a lot of people went and downloaded it for spite to them during the whole Napster debacle. It shows that people tend to react the exact opposite way you want when you start turning into a jerk about something.
Can't we just kill them already? They have produced nothing of value and are making the lives of other people miserable at best.
Where is America's Pirate Party? I wish to vote for them.
Here, but it seems that only Florida Pirate Party and Washington Pirate Party are active. Don't expect a federal Pirate Party anytime soon, though. It wouldn't work very well in the winner-takes-it-all two party system of the US.
My other account has a 3-digit UID.
Your rights are only worth anything if you have the means to actually defend them. In legal theory this is not the case, your rights are supposed to be intrinsic. But in actual reality, this is exactly the case, since money and power can exert pressure and pressure can remove your ability to fight back or (more likely) make the expenditure involved more than you are willing to expend. So yes, the right to fair use no longer exists practically. Your rights can be overridden by funding. You can be shut up by enough money.
It seems to me that the recourse is to overpower them. Despite youtube taking down the video, I suspect there are many copies in the wild. As a user community, one strategy at our disposal is to leverage our numbers, as we did with the HD encryption string, and make sure it's everywhere. Universal needs to understand that if it's fair use, they will only make matters worse for them by trying to suppress it.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Seems like you could specify your mashup declaratively, and let the combining be done by the end-user. Say,
combine(video="The Wizard of Oz", audio="Dark Side of the Moon")
and you can imagine audio and video specifications that could be excerpts from larger streams, concatenation of streams, and with speed modified.
Time-sync'd captioning also applies.
This would put things back in the realm of "is linking a copyright violation" and completely end-run the whole youtube thing, since they would merely see streams going out. And the masher-upper would necessarily need to work from sources already on the user's own computer, which demonstrates that it is not intended solely to evade copyrights, but has a "legitimate" use (scare quotes because I don't care to argue whether or not the mashups are legitimate or not; that's the whole point of the technical dodge).
And if so, what recourse if any is available for artists who are caught in this situation?"
You roll over and take it, and cross your fingers that somewhere down the line these groups attack someone by accident with the resources to fight back. It doesn't matter what's right and wrong. What matters is who has the most disposable money.
Planet Zebeth - Metroid with a twist
So the discussion wasn't moot... but now it's up to UMG to sue if they are going to. They would almost certainly lose.
That doesn't make the DMCA process right, though. There still isn't due process.
And the parody is better than the original.
Usually, the big corporation goes after the individual in court because they know they are wrong, not because they believe they are right.
In this case, however, it's parody and plagiarism at the same time, so I can see the point of both sides.
IANAL
But, no, the definition of parody for fair use requires that the parody be used to comment on the original work. It does not simply mean taking someone else's work and adding funny words. This is why a lot of Weird Al's music is in fact not parody and why he makes a big deal of seeking permission for each song he releases. Everyone just assumes he'd be covered under parody, but a lot of his songs don't really make any comment on the original work itself.
As far as I can tell BLR does nothing to comment on the original work at all. He's probably lucky that he's gotten away with it thus far, and if he's doing any revenue sharing with youtube he'll be luck if someone doesn't sue him.
Contrary to public belief, Youtube is not public. I'm sure youtube says something to the effect of: "if it contains any of your material, adn you want it down, it comes down". The video did contain UMG video, and hence, youtube took it down at UMG request. Makes perfect sense.
It's one video. If you want to post your video, on your site, then UMG can ask you to take it down, and you can refuse, call it fair use, and likely win, 'cause it is.
But you're asking someone else, in this case youtube, to fight your battles. It's your battle. You get to fight it. You get to take the rist. You get to hear from UMG. You get to defend your own turf.
Why are you surprised that no one else is going to defend your rights? Defend them yourself -- you lazy person you.
Alternatively, you can learn to benefit from your own original and innovative creations without basing your work on someone else's hard efforts. You'll find it a lot more difficult to work from essential ingredients, we all do, but you'll have more freedom in doing so.
Intellectual Property is like Government Benefit or Military Intelligence, an oxymoron. Sure people desire compensation for effort (note I said desire, not deserve and cetrtainly not entitlement). But not that way. Find another.
Weird Al Yankovic suddenly gains a serious political significance.
Words, words, words
Just check his channel... http://www.youtube.com/user/BadLipReading#p/c/48076365A788CC3F/6/bQOJwDMZMXw
I don't know of many ways to deal with this sort of bullying. It's the type of bullying that powerful eventually engage in. It certainly isn't the end of the world, but it is pain from dozens of tiny cuts like this.
I can live without what Universal produces. While I love movies, I can and will do without theirs. There are other forms of entertainment out there. Its time to get back to books. It's time to write and share stories with friends. It's time to listen to friends play music and sing with them as opposed to listening to recordings. In short, its time to spend effort to find better ways to really and more sincerely enjoy life. It is possible to wean off of the big companies that control so much? Not quickly, maybe not ever, but maybe enough to influence their behavior.
We should impose a penalty of 1% of gross annual revenue for false positive takedowns. So if a company made 25% over its costs, 25 wrongful takedowns would wipe out its profit entirely. To cover situations where a company has a loss or doesn't make very much we could have a $10,000 (2010 dollars, inflation indexed) penalty per wrongful takedown.
Maybe then I'll accept some of the industry's copyright proposals.