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YouTube Says UMG Had No 'Right' To Take Down Megaupload Video
An anonymous reader writes "Contrary to a previous story, Google played no part in the Megaupload takedown. From Wired: 'YouTube said Friday that Universal Music abused the video-sharing site's piracy filters when it employed them to take down a controversial video of celebrities and pop superstars singing and praising the notorious file-sharing service Megaupload.'"
This shit is why there should be penalties for abuse. These guys routinely do whatever the fuck they want regardless of Fair Use or any other rights the people have. I have seen this myself as every single video I have uploaded that had a DMCA claim made, when I challenged it, the videos were reinstated within a day or two. They know the claims are bullshit, but they're banking on the fact that people won't assert their rights.
Start hitting them with damages when they file these erroneous claims and watch how fast that shit stops....
Me too.
Now I have an account.
Thanks UMG!
There are some good sections of the DMCA -- safe harbor provisions, specific protections for researchers, etc. Some good sections, but then there are the sections that need to be repealed as soon as humanly possible. The anti-circumvention provisions are nothing more than a hand-out to the copyright lobby, the blurring of software and hardware implementations severely restrict an entire class of otherwise protected speech, and the take-down-notice procedure has been widely abused.
In all, no DMCA would have been better -- at least the public would have seen just how out-of-control copyright has become when their favorite websites were driven out of business by lawsuits. Right now the public is shielded from the consequences of overly-broad copyright -- only the hackers and intellectuals who do not fit the mold suffer. If we could keep only the good parts of the DMCA and get rid of the bad, that would be ideal -- yet without broad public support, that will never happen, and as long as it is only the hackers who suffer, there will never be such support.
Palm trees and 8
DMCA itself is good.
+5 Insightful? "DMCA itself is good"? Are you serous? It most definitely is not "good": that abomination should never, ever have been signed into law in its current form. Have you read it? If not, I suggest you do. Yes, SOPA is worse, but keep in mind that an MPAA law firm wrote the DMCA, and handed the thing to their tame Congressman for submission. We know this because a reporter extracted the metadata from the original Word document, and found the names of all the attorneys that had modified or reviewed it. It was not designed to balanced or fair, or to be a reasonable augmentation to copyright to accommodate technological advances. It was, purely and simply, all they thought they could get away with at the time. Look at the history of copyright extension in the U.S. the DMCA was only one of a long line of unholy modifications to copyright law that have done nothing but screw the American people, harm the public domain, and tie up an incredible quantity of court time on issues that often have nothing to do with copyright! It's an excellent period in U.S. history to become an "intellectual property" (whatever the Hell that actually means) lawyer, I suppose. That's another reason why these laws get passed: certain sectors of the legal profession make a lot of money.
So now, a decade down the road, they're pulling out all the stops, buying all the Congresspeople they can, to finally and permanently remove copyright from its Constitutionally-mandated role to "promote the advancement of the useful arts and sciences." Remember who you are dealing with here: you cannot argue with them, you cannot reason with them, and they absolutely will not stop. Period. End of statement.
Personally, I believe the practice of public officials taking bribes from foreign-owned corporations should be considered treasonous. But that's just me. I also have a fond wish that the Department of Justice would expel the ex-RIAA attorneys that our friend and savior Barack Obama appointed, and go after the corporations and corrupt Federal officials that have turned our patent and copyright systems into a corporatist welfare system.
I don't expect to get much joy there either.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.