At Universal's Request, YouTube Yanks News Podcast Over Music Snippet

Snaller writes "Tech News Today does what the name says — it's a podcast reporting on Tech news, Monday to Friday. They, like Slashdot, reported on the Megaupload vs. Universal copyright dispute. But during their coverage, they played a snippet of the music video and immediately Universal Music Group had the news podcast yanked from YouTube. Tech News Today has outlets other than YouTube, but should a music company have the right to have a news podcast removed on copyright grounds, when it's not even clear that said company has had any copyrights violated?"

Comments

And this is why SOPA is so terrifying

[sandytaru]

Shoot first, ask questions never, over things that are arguably as Fair Use as it gets. It will only get worse from here.

Re:And this is why SOPA is so terrifying

[VanGarrett]

Indeed, because I know so many people that use podcasts on YouTube as alternatives to buying CDs. Doesn't everyone?

Re:And this is why SOPA is so terrifying

[honestmonkey]

That snippet was just the piece I needed to complete the song! I've put it together from a lot of other "fair use" sources and almost had the whole thing. But I missed the podcast! And I almost had the song FOR FREE! Damn UMG, damn them all to hell!

Re:And this is why SOPA is so terrifying

[L4t3r4lu5]

Find the lyrics, sing them yourself, and auto-tune it.

It's what Big Media is doing nowadays anyway.

Re:And this is why SOPA is so terrifying

[meerling]

Don't forget that UMG (Universal Music Group) doesn't even have the copyright for this song in the first place. It was a commission promo piece that was done for, and paid for by Megaupload for their purposes. UMG was never even part of the deal, much less a copyright owner of it. It doesn't even use UMG samples in the music. So what UMG is doing, is claiming copyrights they do NOT have to block the promotional use of another company. This is ILLEGAL.
As to a news report using a clip, that has been specifically listed as allowed and fair use in the laws, so is explicitly legal.

ianal (obviously)

And if anyone actually wants to see/hear the song, go to megaupload.com, they have it posted.

Re:And this is why SOPA is so terrifying

[Anonymous Coward]

Shoot first, ask questions never...

This former Marine is getting closer and closer to doing just that.

                    Dear rich people who own the senate,

                                Lots of poor people have lots of guns. More than the military does. Knock off the bullshit, please.

                    Love,
                    Me

Re:And this is why SOPA is so terrifying

[EdIII]

Posting a full song online is not illegal. Illegal specifically means against the law. They are trying to change and pervert the law all the time, so who really knows when even thinking about a song without authorization is actually against a law, but today posting a song is not illegal.

Copyright law structures the copyright and enumerates and defines the rights (legal entitlements). If you have violated copyright law, which meets the definition of illegal, it is because you have improperly constructed a copyright or some other equivalent.

Posting of the song is infringement of a copyright, not a law, which is very different in several important ways.

The prevalence of the terms illegal, theft, stealing, etc. in regards to copyright is merely a disingenuous attempt to characterize what is essentially a civil dispute over contractual violations in a legal agreement constructed through copyright law.

Since it requires too much work, and money, to take actual responsibility of your legal rights, there has been a movement to appropriate authority that was usually reserved for criminal acts and actual crime and abrogate any legal entitlements the consumer thought they (quite reasonably) had.

In addition to the propaganda campaign that includes the redefining and perversion of the words theft, steal, illegal, copyright, fair use, etc. Big Content has actively engaged in activities that are unlawful, unethical, and an effective bypass and nullification of the Judicial system. After all, participating in the Judicial system costs real money. Same exact principle behind deeds of trust for real estate, which is excusing yourself from any meaningful participation in the Judicial system and eliminating any chance of the other party seeking remediation through law.

While the emergence of digital technologies and communications, that were once the realm of Sci-Fi, has utterly destroyed the barrier to entry for copyright infringement, that does not justify the serious harm against society.

The mere fact that a large corporation can act as judge, jury, and executioner against 3rd parties with no legal or contractual basis of any kind, without consequence, and without regulation, is evidence that the system is broken.

So with respect, and I do not apologize for being pedantic, it is not illegal. It is infringing.

Any case of infringement, especially these ones, are within the jurisdiction of the courts and must involve due process.

Due process is the bane of Big Content. The reason should be obvious. If they had to actually explain and justify their actions... they would lose. They can't explain why if a customer paid them money they should not be able to enjoy the work in any form they want and back it up. They can't explain why using portions of the copyrighted work for educational and journalistic purposes should be barred, or how it even harms them.

They don't want to explain or justify anything. Just control it without opposition at any cost. Society be damned. After all, they need to afford those hookers, blow, and expensive toys some how.

Punish unjust copyright claims

[ZorroXXX]

The only way to make these kinds of problems go away is to make it illegal and punishable to claim copyright on something that you do not own the copyright for.

Re:Punish unjust copyright claims

[jythie]

*nods* that is the major flaw.. there are no consequences for fraudulent takedowns.

Re:Punish unjust copyright claims

[BigSlowTarget]

Civil: Online Policy Group v. Diebold, Incorporated - Diebold sued for false DMCA and paid $125k.

Even if it were more possible, do you really think anyone would criminally prosecute a large company for just a false DMCA? Prosecutors gain nothing from that and just waste their resources for a minor offense against a company's major legal team. The end result would just end up being angering potential donors to political campaigns except when those donors encouraged prosecution of small copyright holders too poor to afford good lawyers.

Re:Punish unjust copyright claims

[Penguinisto]

Personally, I'd like to see the DMCA amended to add one thing:

"If the claimed infringed work is owned by an incorporated entity, claimant shall post a bond equal to at least 1% of the annual income of that corporation for each claim, and if the claim is found to be false, claimant shall forfeit that bond to the person or entity being claimed against." ...or something similar (and a lot more air-tight).

Make 'em put their money where their DMCA claim is.

Re:Punish unjust copyright claims

[elfprince13]

It already is. Under OCILLA/DMCA 512, UMG's lawyers have probably just perjured themselves. The trick is making it stick.

Re:Punish unjust copyright claims

[heathen_01]

Why the fuck do you allow corporates to donate to political parties?

Re:Punish unjust copyright claims

[zzatz]

No, Universal does not have copyright to the music involved, which was what made it newsworthy.

Re:Punish unjust copyright claims

[David Chappell]

In this case, they did ask that something they have the copyright to be taken down.

Actually, Universal only claims to have copyright to the first video. This seems unlikely since the video is a criticism of Universal. Now they have taken down a video that is a news report on their disputed claim to the first video. Use of short clips to illustrate a news report is such a classic case of fair use that no rights holder can claim to be unaware that the use is lawful. A takedown request is either grossly incompetent or malicious.

What Megaupload has done here is brilliant. They have baited Universal into conducting a dramatic live demonstration of the dangers of giving copyright holder unilateral takedown powers.

Re:Punish unjust copyright claims

[Grishnakh]

George Bush was voted IN, not out. He served two terms, the maximum allowed by law, and then someone else was voted in because Bush wasn't allowed to run any more, by law.

He's talking about Obama, who in practice isn't any different from Bush in most ways, and is even more in the pocket of Hollywood and the copyright cartels, along with his buddy Biden.

Re:Punish unjust copyright claims

[Anthony Mouse]

It seems to me that you could solve the problem pretty well in the following way: If a copyright holder negligently issues a take down for material that is likely to be fair use, the civil damages are no less than 5% of the total revenues collected with respect to that copyrighted work. If the copyright holder intentionally issues such a take down [like Diebold], the damages are no less than one million dollars.

That would pretty well sort it out, and with no help from any prosecutors office: The victims could collect directly in civil court. And copyright holders who find they are unable to tell whether something is fair use are free to request an injunction in court instead of using the take down process, so that a judge can make that determination in an adversarial proceeding prior to the copyright holder subjecting itself to any liability for issuing a fraudulent take down.

Re:Punish unjust copyright claims

[Dog-Cow]

It's been this way forever

FTFY.

Re:Punish unjust copyright claims

[rickb928]

From the U.S. Copyright Office:

"Section 107 contains a list of the various purposes for which the reproduction of a particular work may be considered fair, such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, and research. Section 107 also sets out four factors to be considered in determining whether or not a particular use is fair:

The purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes
The nature of the copyrighted work
The amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole
The effect of the use upon the potential market for, or value of, the copyrighted work"

Sounds like this snippet met the third purpose. It also seems the rights holder would have a hard time demonstrating the fourth factor, though they would essentially shut YouTube down if they could demonstrate the first factor was a commercial nature, and claimed Google was the commercial beneficiary of that.

The 'amount and substantiality' factor leads you to think that a short clip could violate that, but could we argue in court that a short snippet would actually enhance the market or value by further popularizing the original work and driving even more audience and buyers that might otherwise not be exposed, and did not recieve a substantive portion of the work, therefore impelling them to purchase?

Or more simply put, having heard a short snippet, some of those YouTube viewers might actually buy the damned song that would not otherwise be aware of it at all?

We need to do a lot of work on this, starting at the ballot box.

Re:Punish unjust copyright claims

[jahudabudy]

I would. It's clear that any group whose primary purpose is to advance the financial well-being of it's members is going to participate in the political process only where there is a perceived financial benefit to doing so. This perverts the political process. Ban it all.

I doubt approval from YouTube is even necessary

[daitengu]

It's quite likely that large corporations like Universal, Viacom, etc. have access to pull things down from YouTube on copyright claims without Youtube's approval.

I assume Youtube assumed these organizations would use their power responsibly. Perhaps that assumption needs to be revisited.

No

[klingens]

It obviously doesn't have the right. It's fair use for the purpose of reporting news.

This is simple collateral damage when you use software to automatically flag copyright violations and then act on that software's flagging automatically too cause humans are simply too expensive to police it all manually. Happens all the time. All the usual slashdot tropes of printers which do torrents, grandmas that get notices, openoffice that gets removed from ftp servers, etc.

Youtube and your mail client's spamfilter have the same problem: false positives. Both use an automated system to flag violations of policy and in both cases it mostly works but never 100%. You cannot demand from youtube or the RIAA to flag it all manually, just like you can't really flag all your spam manually: if you do, either Youtube goes out of business cause their business model does not allow that many employees and still serve you videos for "free". Or the major labels go out of business since they have to hire people to police youtube and demand even more per song. I'm sure many /.ers would like this 2nd outcome but it's not really realistic or actually desirable either.

So Tech News should alert youtube to unblock their video and move on. Oh I forgot: better to post it to slashdot frontpage so Tech News can get a few thousand more hits! Genius! The RIAA is evil after all.

Re:No

[SoTerrified]

cause humans are simply too expensive to police it all manually.

This is ridiculous. That's like saying everyone arrested should just be considered guilty and sentenced because it's simply too expensive to have trials for everyone. Yes, our courts are jammed and yes, trials are a burden, but the alternative is simply unacceptable.

So why is this any different?

Re:No

[acedtect]

Just to be clear we, at Tech news Today have posted a counter-notice and YouTube requires our show to stay off YouTube for 10 days to give UMG the opportunity to decide whether to take us to court or not. We also did not submit this story to Slashdot.

DMCA Gives the Right

[pscottdv]

should a music company have the right to have a news podcast removed on copyright grounds, when it's not even clear that said company has had any copyrights violated?

Should they? No. But the DMCA gives them the right (or at least the ability) to do so. It gives it to you, too. My understanding is that anyone can file a DMCA takedown notice.

I have often wondered what would happen if people started filing DMCA takedown notices by the millions on major websites against the big content producers. There doesn't seem to be any penalty for filing bogus notices.

Re:DMCA Gives the Right

[Rob the Bold]

I have often wondered what would happen if people started filing DMCA takedown notices by the millions on major websites against the big content producers. There doesn't seem to be any penalty for filing bogus notices.

If individuals started doing this, I assure you there would be consequences for them. The feds, the MPAAs and RIAAs and their members, and even YouTube itself understands that this law can be abused, but that privilege is for the modern nobility, not the masses.

Music Video Irrelevant

[Vegemeister]

The copyright status of the clip used is irrelevant. The situation is this: Media conglomerates have been given editorial control of Youtube, subject only to the ability of posters to retain high-priced legal counsel. They can and do use these powers to further their own agenda.

MegaUpload Video

[AdamJS]

They did not have the copyright to it.

Re:MegaUpload Video

[WilCompute]

This clip was in no way owned by UMG. Megaupload solicited and paid the artist for the comercial, has releases from the artist to prove it. Megaupload holds the copyright to the video. UMG filed the takedown notice on the clip without holding the copyright, which was the story covered by TNT. TNT showed a video of the clip, without audio, and spoke over the clip. At the end, to show how bad the song was, they played less than 3 seconds of the end of the clip. UMG is being taken to court by Megaupload over the takedown notice for the original video. I was the original broadcast of TNT. UMG is censoring the news, and acting anti-competitively.

Please stop being a shill and think. Spread FUD elsewhere.

Re:Fair Use?

[SuricouRaven]

Same as always. Fair use is a perfectly valid defence, providing you are willing to spend a huge pile of money hireing lawyers and going to court over it. That's just how it usually works with the legal system: People have as many rights as they can afford to defend, and no more.