NASA's Own Video of Curiosity Landing Crashes Into a DMCA Takedown

derekmead writes "NASA's livestream coverage of the Curiosity rover's landing on Mars was practically as flawless as the landing itself. But NASA couldn't prepare for everything. An hour or so after Curiosity's 1.31 a.m. EST landing in Gale Crater,the space agency's main YouTube channel had posted a 13-minute excerpt of the stream. Ten minutes later, the video was gone, replaced with the message: 'This video contains content from Scripps Local News, who has blocked it on copyright grounds. Sorry about that.' That is to say, a NASA-made video posted on NASA's official YouTube channel, documenting the landing of a $2.5 billion Mars rover mission paid for with public taxpayer money, was blocked by YouTube because of a copyright claim by a private news service."

Comments

Re:There is a $500 fine for this

[mr_lizard13]

$500 for private individuals. 10% of global turnover for incorporated companies. Seems fair.

Copyright violations

[girlintraining]

That's the problem with the copyright filters at Youtube and elsewhere: Copyright is based on the production of a work, not the work itself. So if NASA releases footage of something that is public domain (paid for by your tax dollars) then if, say, NBC, replays that footage and adds a logo in the lower right corner... NBC can then sue you if you save that footage to your harddrive. So the content might be "Curiousity rover team hugging", which can't be copyrighted, but the production of it is. Since NASA made it public domain, they have no rights to it whatsoever, so anyone can take the content, re-broadcast it, and then claim copyright on that broadcasted content.

Which is a problem in a digital environment: How can you tell whether something came from the original (public domain) source, or the re-broadcaster? YouTube's auto-filters obviously can't. There's no way to tell original from copy; And guess who gets sued if they don't block when they could have? Which underscores another problem with copyright law: Presumed guilt. DMCA notices force providers to take down potentially infringing content. Not actually infringing, potentially-infringing. It's a presumption of guilt; Your innocence must then be established later. And with technology like this, how can a judge, or even yourself, tell the difference between the original 101110101000101110100011 and the copied 101110101000101110100011?

Re:There is a $500 fine for this

[klingens]

This is especially warranted since this is not the first time these Scripps people did this: http://www.fidosysop.org/4460/04/scripps-local-news-removing-nasa-videos-from-youtube/
Last April, Scripps did the same thing with the video of space shuttle Discovery's last voyage to the Smithsonian.
One time is an accident, 2 times is malice and should be acted upon

Close to home.

[Anonymous Coward]

I operate a youtube channel with just over 100,000 subscribers. I almost had my account permanently suspended when several of my government produced, copyright-free videos of 1940s military footage were flagged by some no-name spanish news station. These videos were converted directly from library archive originals. My only saving grace was one of my subscribers was a lower end employee of Google at the time and was able to contact the right people.

What would have happened to me had I not been so lucky?

Re:awesome publicity for public awareness

[cpu6502]

It seems more-likely that Scripps contracted with Youtube to automatically have any content removed that has an "audio signature" which matches Scripps own uploaded videos. In other words, no people involved.

I've heard radio host Alex Jones complain about this. Some corporation (CBS Radio if I recall correctly) has contracted a DJ for their national news starting in 2011. However they claim ownership of ALL recordings by that DJ, both present and past. So youtube is automatically removing all videos of said DJ, including interviews on Jones' show from ten years ago. There's no person involved... just a computer doing automatic filtering & automatic takedowns.

Re:shut Scripps down for 24 hours

[budgenator]

Actually I was thinking along the same lines, IANAL but it occurred to me that Copyright law gives entities the right to control the copying of a work, a false take-down notice infringes on the copyright holder's right to control the distribution of a work, and since NASA is a US government agency it does not hold the copyright but passes it to the public domain, or to "We The People". Perhaps we should fine a good shyster and have him file a class action against scripts for infringing on the copyright of "We The People", a quarter of a million dollars times 300 million people, should get their attention.

Re:Unintended Consequences? Unfortunately - Not!

[Lumpy]

There is an answer. Any false claim like this results in a $100,00 automatic fine that has 80% paid to the person who's video was taken down and 20% to youtube.

PUNISH people for DMCA take downs if they are false. Negative reinforcment works better than any other.

Get With It, Slashdot

[brit74]

I read the summary and concluded that Scripps Local News blocked the video using a false copyright claim. But, then I read the actual article:

"YouTube will block or censor content for one of three reasons: if a video violates the site’s terms of service, if its content is automatically found to match copyrighted content, or if it receives a request from a copyright owner to remove a pirated video." ... Content ID, YouTube’s automated copyright monitor, was meant to be the site’s secret weapon in its fight to stay legal, and make some sense – or cents – out of the video chaos: by algorithmically matching content, robots can, ideally, keep track of which videos contain copyrighted material.

So, basically, the whole takedown might've had nothing to do with Scripps Local News issuing a false takedown, and might've had everything to do with YouTube's robots misidentifying the video. Now, we've got a whole comment section full of people who want to attack Scripps for issuing a false takedown, even though we're not even sure what exactly happened. Please update the summary, Slashdot.

Re:awesome publicity for public awareness

[pixelpusher220]

The DMCA's "It has to be taken down right now!" policy

without any ability to stop the takedown prior to its execution is fundamentally unconstitutional.

Charged with a 'criminal act and prosecuted' is better because you can get the damn case thrown out 'with prejudice' and get your expenses paid when the person claiming copyright is 'wrong'.

Re:awesome publicity for public awareness

[N0Man74]

I've heard similar stories. I remember seeing a story about a couple of guys who made a YouTube video. This Tonight Show decided to replay this video during their ending credits. Apparently an automated system detected the original YouTube video as matching the content from the NBC footage, and was automatically taken down.

It's absurdity...

And that is without even considering that detecting a small segment of the NBC broadcast is considered infringement would be considered infringement (and not fair use), while NBC broadcasting the complete video created by someone else was not.

Re:awesome publicity for public awareness

[ghostdoc]

While your comment is indeed +5 Insightful. It is also off topic since no company filed a complaint, the video was caught by a over zealous automated system.

It was indeed a company that filed the complaint, their name is right there in the message that the video is blocked by.... That they let a over zealous automated system file complaints on their behalf does not absolve them from being responsible.

Interesting question actually. Not sure that's been tested in law yet.
People doing things as a consequence of their employment are representing a company and the company is responsible.
Officers of a company are vicariously liable for the things that their employees do.
But is a company responsible for the actions of software claiming to represent it?
IANAL, just a business student (in another country), so if there's anyone out there who does know, I'd be interested...