The Algorithmic Copyright Cops: Streaming Video's Robotic Overlords

thomst writes "Geeta Dayal of Wired's Threat Level blog posts an interesting report about bot-mediated automatic takedowns of streaming video. He mentions the interruption of Michelle Obama's speech at the DNC, and the blocking of NASA's coverage of Mars rover Curiosity's landing by a Scripps News Service bot, but the story really drills down on the abrupt disappearance of the Hugo Award's live stream of Neil Gaiman's acceptance speech for his Doctor Who script. (Apparently the trigger was a brief clip from the Doctor Who episode itself, despite the fact that it was clearly a case of fair use.) Dayal points the finger at Vobile, whose content-blocking technology was used by Ustream, which hosted the derailed coverage of the Hugos."

Comments

Geeta Dayal is female

[Anonymous Coward]

Might want to double check your pronouns.

Re:'Fair Use' is not sufficiently well defined

[symbolset]

Actually, Viacom sued google for distributing on youtube content uploaded by their own employees, both from their own offices and the employees homes.

Re:'Fair Use' is not sufficiently well defined

[jthill]

PP is, in every relevant way false.

Fair use is, by statute declaration, not copyright infringement at all. Copyright holders have no authority at all to forbid any fair use.

PP might as well have said a lot of people have a big misunderstanding of what "innocence" is, that "innocence" is just a defense you can use.

The criteria for fair use are laid out in statute law and have decades of case law to back them. Courts have the same discretion in finding the boundaries of fair use as they have in finding the boundaries of any other law, and the same responsibility. There's nothing at all remarkable about that discretion, it's why they're called "Judge".