Slashdot Mirror
Corporate Claims On Public Domain YouTube Videos
esocid writes "Cory Doctorow has written a Guardian column, 'The pirates of YouTube,' about how multinational copyright-holding companies have laid false claim to public domain videos on YouTube. The videos are posted by the nonprofit FedFlix organization, which liberates public domain government-produced videos and makes them available to the world. These videos were produced at public expense and no one can claim to own them, but multinationals from CBS to Discovery Communications have done just that, getting YouTube to place ads on the video that deliver income to their coffers. What's more, their false copyright claims could lead to the suspension of FedFlix's YouTube account under Google's rules for its copyright policing system. This system, ContentID, sets out penalties for 'repeat offenders' who generate too many copyright claims — but offers no corresponding penalties for rightsholders who make too many false claims of ownership."
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Is this is the end stage for the ownership of ideas: that just as there is no longer "public land" in the sense that every piece of land has an owner (even if it is the government), every idea will need an owner?
Do you like Japanese imports?
Counter-notices are an invitation to sue and ContentID suffers from a horrendous number of false-positives. Good luck fighting a GEMA claim by the way (they claim everything, even if the artist in question isn't a member).
but offers no corresponding penalties for rightsholders who make too many false claims of ownership
That's just like our legal system then!
I just spent a few hours making a video and set it to public domain music. A day later, Youtube blocked it in Germany and said it might put ads on it. The appeals process went straight to the company claiming ownership of the music and was unsurprisingly rejected with no other course of action.
Seriously, fuck GEMA.
Their practices are harmful to themselves, the artists they claim to represent and the users. While other, similar organizations may have been late to the whole internet thing and still don't get it GEMA acts like it doesn't even exist as a media platform or something.
Again, fuck GEMA.
If you are short of some good Christmas reading, you could do a lot worse than James Boyle's excellent book, "The Public Domain." It looks at a number of similar issues, critiquing the rise in the enclosure of the public domain, with the call to arms that, without defenders actively arguing in favour of the public domain, it will be gradually eroded by the proprietary claims of third parties, since it has no voice, nor lobbying power, of its own.
He has made it available in PDF under (CC) BY-NC-SA 3.0, so you can "try before you buy" or else not buy it if you do not want to but, in my opinion, it's worth every penny. (Although I feel rather stupid having a hard copy sitting untouched on my shelf, just so James and his publishers receive money, when the electronic copy was worth far more to me!)
David Bollier's "Public Assets, Private Profits" (sorry - Google link) is definitely worth reading, too, for those who care about the preservation of the commons.
That's a criminal offense. See 17 USC 506(c): "Fraudulent Copyright Notice. -- Any person who, with fraudulent intent, places on any article a notice of copyright or words of the same purport that such person knows to be false, or who, with fraudulent intent, publicly distributes or imports for public distribution any article bearing such notice or words that such person knows to be false, shall be fined not more than $2,500. "
The Department of Justice is squishy-soft on enforcing this. It's apparently never been enforced. Nor does it create a private right of action, so you can't sue under it.
Another issue with this system is that it's easily trolled. There's people who put false claims in claiming to be a company when they're really not associated with the company at all.
It's a common problem with My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic videos on Youtube. Hasbro (the owner) allows them to be up, including full episodes. Someone else claims to be Hasbro and has it pulled, then the poster has to go to real Hasbro to get them to tell Youtube to reverse it. Eventually the account gets "flagged" for repeated violations even though they've all been false positives.
The system just plain sucks at handling this stuff.
-- "So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated." - Bill Gates
Yea, how dare Google cater more towards the people who pay them actual money than the people who use their service for free. I mean, I gave them my zero dollars and all they gave me in return was something close to but not exactly what I want. I hope those bastards rot in hell goddamnit.
How dare people demand ethical behavior from Google in a capitalist economy! The horror!
none
"83% of Jefferson quotes are made up on the spot"
"Never trust a man who cites statistics, especially when he's talking about me." - Thomas Jefferson
Try not to take me more seriously than I take myself.
We've actually come a long way in the last decade in terms of being able to make public use of the public domain in the U.S. The vast majority of works that are PD in the US are ones that were copyrighted after 1922 but reverted to the public domain because their copyrights were not renewed. It used to be that if you came across a book from 1927, you could be almost certain that it was PD (simply because, statistically, few books had their copyrights renewed), but you wouldn't have any way of making sure, because the renewal records weren't online. But the good folks at Carnegie Mellon, Project Gutenberg, and Distributed Proofreaders did all the hard, dreary work of digitizing the records and putting them online in searchable form. So for example, a creative-commons-licensed physics textbook that I wrote includes a drawing of a boy hanging by his arms from a bar. The drawing is from a 1927 physics textbook, which I know is PD because I was able to check online that the copyright was not renewed. Another great thing about living in the US is that our law says that a faithful reproduction of a PD work can't be copyrighted (Bridgeman Art Library, Ltd. v. Corel Corp., 1999). I have a portrait of Isaac Newton in my book that is a photo of a 17th-century oil painting. I got a nastygram once from the museum in the UK that owns the painting, saying I was violating their copyright. Sent them back an email saying, "Sorry, not copyrightable in the country where I live," and that was the end of that.
It gets a lot harder when you're dealing with sound recordings and moving pictures. The records aren't digitized by the government, and even if they were to be digitized, it would not necessarily be easy to index and search them. Unlike a book, a sound recording doesn't always have any clear labeling as to its title. Indexing sound and movies is a hard problem. It requires a ton of computing power to do well. What we really need is someone with a super-huge CPU farm who is willing to put tons of computational effort into indexing these things. I wonder who has the facilities necessary for that? Uh, Google, that's who. Google owns YouTube.
Here is a PD video I put together of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge collapsing -- a classic staple of American physics education for three generations. About 10 years ago, you could only get this by paying a ton of money to an educational video company. I found two newsreels about the bridge at archive.org, one silent and one with music and narration. I spliced them together. Since the first one was silent, I found a recording of some vintage jazz that fit, and voila, I had a PD replacement for the laserdisc that my college had bought for hundreds of dollars.
About a year later, I got an email from YouTube saying that the jazz tune I'd used in the video (Boot It, by Bennie Moten) actually wasn't PD. I was originally annoyed and sure they were wrong. But I looked into it, and it looked like sure enough, it was still in copyright. Archive.org had apparently not realized that a certain percentage of Bennie Moten's work was still in copyright. The rights holder is selling the recording online. And you know what? YouTube didn't try to crush me. They didn't sue me. They didn't send me a DMCA notice. They didn't take down the video or make me take it down. They simply started pulling revenue from it and giving some of that revenue to the copyright owner. Really not a problem.
So although it sounds like FedFlix has a problem, my own experience with YouTube was that they performed a service for me that nobody else was willing to perform: they figured out whether an old piece of music was actually PD. The end result is that it's a big win for everyone.
And I can't help feeling that Cory Doctorow, as in many of his hand-wringing advocacy pieces, is being a little overwrought. The problem here is not that FedFlix is being su
Find free books.
You are defending a company for stiffing their entire userbase in exchange for cash from a third party.
It's a dick move for ANY business to make regardless of whether it is profitable or not.
This sounds like it needs to be counter exploited, and hard.
The only way to establish precident for enforcement of false copyright claims, is to have a phyrric entity serving in the public's interest do exactly what big content is doing, but directed at big content.
An example might be to create a software program that outputs every possible combination of notes permissible under the rules of standard musical notation, then file copyright on it. Using this copyrighted "song", file DMCA takedown notices of every single big media production featuring a musical score, claiming that they are profiting illegally from a partial inclusion of your copyrighted "song".
Keep spamming the shit out of eg, the CBS and pal's youtube offerings with dmca notices, exploit the one-sidedness of the reporting system in the same way they exploit it against far use and public domain assets, and keep after it in earnest.
After a few weeks of that, the big media giants will sue. When they do, they will use their lawyers to win, and in so doing, establish a poisonous precedent against this practice.
The only way to get the assfucks to work for you is to socially engineer them into painting themselves into a corner.
I suggest that we (ordinary people) endeavor to do exactly that.
What part of "offering a free service doesn't grant you the right to be unethical" do you not understand?
none
There is also an implied, "do the right thing" clause that, when violated, can get a real nasty backlash. Its human nature, not contract law, get used to it.
That's just the easy part. You also need to be able to get legal representation of the right kind. If you can't afford a lawyer, you won't get the precedent that you need.
You will have to be very careful to:
a) Have someone show up the the trial or the case will be summarily dismissed without any precedent being set.
b) Have a lawyer who keeps the argument on-track enough so that the corporation's slimy lawyers can't avoid the counter-arguments that you need to have heard in court.
c) Avoid having a judge order you to attempt to settle or go into some sort of arbitration or dismiss the case as frivolous. Judges will not like your attempt to game the system and clog up their already huge caseloads and will make it very difficult indeed to get the right precedent that you want. Since they write the decisions that create the precedents, it's as much about painting a judge into a corner, as it is the corporations.
d) Have a lawyer who can stand up to possible ethics and professional charges when they try trickery like this. There are rules, even among thieves.
e) Not win your case.
Point E is sort of funny, but you can easily end up doing the work of the corporations for you. And both the respondent and even the judge may well collude to give you a victory, especially if they understand your motives.
How is this hyperbole? The videos in question are of government origin, produced using your and my tax dollars, paid for by us (if you are also a US Citizen and taxpayer). Google is allowing people to fraudulently claim stuff you and me paid for and have paid for a legal right to see. Yeah, it's not their entire user base, it's only the entire taxpaying population of the US and of any foreign power who also signed the Berne convention. It doesn't include North Korea or Burkina Faso or wherever , but it sure as hell includes literally billions of people, so again, how is this hyperbole? And while you're at it, you can give away your rights all you want, but please stop being so eager to give away mine.
Who is John Cabal?