YouTube Threatens To Remove Scientist's Account Over AIDS Deniers' DMCA Claims

First time accepted submitter EwanPalmer writes "YouTube is threatening to remove the account of a scientist who made a series of videos debunking claims made in an AIDS denialist movie over copyright infringement disagreement. Myles Power is claiming the producers of controversial 2009 documentary House of Numbers are attempting to censor him by submitting bogus DMCA claims against him. He says his movies do not breach copyright laws because his films are educational and therefore fair use. The 'AIDS denialist' documentary makers say they instead amounted to 'propaganda.'"

Comments

"educational" is not "fair use"

[Anonymous Coward]

Otherwise all that leaked Windows source code would be fair use.

Copyright was a good idea, spoiled.

Re:"educational" is not "fair use"

[Luckyo]

Discussing parts of legally released copyright code on the other hand is fair use. You know, like discussing parts of legally released movie.

Re:"educational" is not "fair use"

[hey!]

You should read up on fair use. The purpose and character of the use is the first of four factors in deciding whether fair use applies. A simple copy is merely *derivative*, not *transformative*.

Re:"educational" is not "fair use"

[mysidia]

Otherwise all that leaked Windows source code would be fair use.

It is fair use to excerpt a video for educational purposes, and specifically --- to illustrate exactly what parts your criticism is about, and to crystalize in the minds of the viewers: portions relevant to the discussion in order to substantiate which claims are being debunked.

Re:"educational" is not "fair use"

[Anonymous Coward]

Discussing parts of legally released copyright code on the other hand is fair use. You know, like discussing parts of legally released movie.

You are totally right, however you do not need the "legally" qualification here. Many Americans don't seem to realise exactly how strong the "fair use" rules are. This is one of the few remaining areas where US law is clearly more pro-freedom than most European law. This is because the fair use rules are not actually rules. They are a direct representation of the first amendment acting on copyright law. The first amendment gives you the absolute right to freedom of political speech. If you need to show an "illegal" part of a movie in order to make your point clearly then whatever law made that illegal becomes unconstitutional because it is blocking your first amendment rights. Fair use is just a recognition of that for copyright which allows copyright laws to remain constitutional.

Any time that you need to use material in order to make an argument then you have the right to use as much as you need to make your argument. For example, if you claim that "every sentence in the entire film contains a lie" and then you set out to prove that, you could use the the entire film with no gaps. However, you would have to stop after every sentence and have an in depth explanation of why it is a lie. For a one hour film, you would end up producing four or more hours of analysis.

The important point, however, is that if there was a section of the film you didn't want to comment on, then there is no need to leave it in. If you say something like "in the next ten minutes the same stupidity continues" you don't need to show that part of the film to make your argument. At this point copyright law reasserts and you are not allowed to use that part of the film. This is where the potential problems occur. You may want to leave in a longer segment in order not to be seen to be cheating in which case there would have to be a complicated discussion about whether you are justified or not. Simply don't do that. Either cut it or continue to comment the whole way through.

Re:"educational" is not "fair use"

[Stolpskott]

Educational use is one of the fundamental uses of the Fair Use doctrine, as long as there is no commercial gain derived directly from the application of Fair Use.
Quoting from 17 U.S.C 107:

Notwithstanding the provisions of sections 17 U.S.C. 106 and 17 U.S.C. 106A, the fair use of a copyrighted work, including such use by reproduction in copies or phonorecords or by any other means specified by that section, for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research, is not an infringement of copyright. In determining whether the use made of a work in any particular case is a fair use the factors to be considered shall include:

the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a 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; and

the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.

So... this use is valid on the grounds that it is criticism (in both of the main definitions of the word), comment, and teaching, if the person applying the Fair Use doctrine is not claiming any direct commercial benefit from the use of said copyrighted information. Unless, of course, the original authors can show that the original work is of a specific nature that would itself invalidate Fair Use; the re-user had included all or the vast majority of the original piece directly in his response; or the re-use substantially affected the commercial value of the original work (probably requires a before/after study of revenue generated from the work to be presented in justification for the copyright claim, not something that can be submitted with a DCMA request).

In this case, both sides will probably feel justified in labeling the other's position as "propaganda", with their own as "education", although it shows the AIDS-deniers' viewpoint and world view as being very narrow, because "any view other than something that completely aligns with mine is incorrect, and worse propaganda, so must be expunged from view so that my Universal Truth can be seen in all its glory"...

Re:"educational" is not "fair use"

[flyneye]

A fine example of why you cant possibly own intangible goods.
You can pretend you own intangible goods, but, then someone will have the same idea and use it, share it and talk about it.
Quit pretending other own ideas you have or have heard. Use them. Ignore copyright till it goes away. Abuse it and those who utilize it.
The world needs to take back its brains, by force if necessary. This ridiculous charade has gone on long enough and enough manpower and time has been wasted to make it all so not worth it to continue the charade.
Face it, the only people who REALLY use copyright are our enemies. There may be a few foolish individuals who will wise up and get with the program, but major corporations really need to fall and break into thousands of tiny pieces that amount to a widespread redistribution of wealth in a healthy, natural way. Stockholders and corporate officers should be outed and castigated publicly. Make intellectual property as popular as bubonic plague and watch the world bloom into a better place to live.
Real Property IS the ONLY property with any REAL value. The rest is all in some morons head.

Re:"educational" is not "fair use"

[Devoidoid]

The big problem is, you can do all your due diligence and claim Fair Use in your usage of copyrighted material, but Fair Use doesn't actually exist until someone sues you for infringement and loses because a judge agrees with you. If you cannot defend yourself in court, you only have Fair Use until you lose an infringement suit.

Re:"educational" is not "fair use"

[N0Man74]

Fair Use is a good idea too, spoiled.

Being education doesn't automatically allow Fair Use, but it is one of multiple factors (along with the nature of the use, amount used and substantiality, and the effect that the use can have on the value or marketability of the work).

James McCanney

[Anonymous Coward]

James McCanney is a nut job and deserves to be ignored.

Re:James McCanney

[Anonymous Coward]

Anyone who claims AIDS isn't AIDS is a nut job and deserves to be dosed with their claimed "not AIDS" virus so they can see first hand what it is.

Re:James McCanney

[tmosley]

Belief in belief is a terrible thing. It would be nice if we could set those people down and force them to choose between injecting HIV+ blood into themselves, or admitting that they don't actually believe in what they are saying.

If they really believe, they should volunteer for such a scientific study. Then they should change their minds when they get the disease.

Sadly, humans aren't rational, and are often violently opposed to rational thinking, far preferring doublethink.

Re:James McCanney

[Anonymous Coward]

Then they should change their minds when they get the disease.

Or would they? "Denialist" label comes not from simply disagreeing, but actively denying things even when smacked with facts in the face, repeatedly.

Here, check this out. TL;DR: AIDS-infected mother, a founder of an AIDS denialist organization, gives birth, doesn't stop breastfeeding even though it rises chances of HIV transmission, dosn't test daughter for HIV - and here comes why it's called denialism:

An autopsy revealed that Eliza Jane was markedly underweight and underheight (consistent with a chronic illness), exhibited pronounced atrophy of her thymus and other lymphatic organs, and died of pneumonia caused by Pneumocystis jirovecii, a common opportunistic pathogen in people with AIDS and the leading cause of pediatric AIDS deaths.[13] The post-mortem examination of Eliza Jane's brain showed changes consistent with HIV encephalitis; protein components of HIV itself were identified in Eliza Jane's brain tissue via immunohistochemistry.[12] The coroner concluded that Eliza Jane had died of Pneumocystis pneumonia in the setting of advanced AIDS.[2][12]

Maggiore rejected the coroner's conclusion, ascribing it to political bias and attacking the personal credibility of the senior coroner.[14] Maggiore had the autopsy reviewed by Mohammed Al-Bayati, a veterinary pathologist who holds a Ph.D. in animal disease pathology but is not a medical doctor nor board-certified in human pathology.[15] Al-Bayati argued that Eliza Jane had died from an allergic reaction to amoxicillin, a conclusion Maggiore embraced.[2] Al-Bayati's report has been dismissed as medically unsound by independent pathology experts, who agreed with the coroner's conclusion that Eliza Jane had died of complications of untreated AIDS.[16][2][4]

"Nope, it's all a cover up and a conspiracy. Instead of facing the facts, I'll prefer to believe a fellow AIDS denialist veterinary's incompetent conclusion (*from Al-Bayati's entry in Wikipedia: "Al-Bayati did not review the coroner's pathology slides, but only looked at her medical records") and go on advancing views which basically took my daughter's life when she wasn't even 5."

Myles is correct.

[Anonymous Coward]

He made a series of videos for educational commentary, containing scenes from the movie in question. It falls under fair use.

Re:Myles is correct.

[AK Marc]

He also (apparently) refuses to issue a formal counter-claim asserting they do not violate copyright. If they are fair use, he can counter-claim and be done with it (until they sue him). He's effectively acknowledging that he's violating copyright by refusing to contest the assertions.

Re:Myles is correct.

[mysidia]

If they are fair use, he can counter-claim and be done with it (until they sue him). He's effectively acknowledging that he's violating copyright by refusing to contest the assertions.

He does not have to make a formal counterclaim, until the matter goes before a judge.

He has an inalienable right to continue to post and publish his content, until ordered otherwise or enjoined from doing so by a court of law.

Re:Myles is correct.

[Anonymous Coward]

The problem is if you get three copyright strikes against your channel, you're out.

Contest a copyright claim and fail? That's a strike right there.
 
This guy has 5 videos on the debunking of those whack jobs, so that's 5 copyright claims...

Re:Myles is correct.

[Anonymous Coward]

He has an inalienable right to continue to post and publish his content, until ordered otherwise or enjoined from doing so by a court of law.

Except for the whole issue of fair use being a legal defense and not an "inalienable right" and that he is posting them via website owned by someone else that can decide not to publish his content for him.

Re:Myles is correct.

[Darinbob]

However Youtube can just take down the videos, they are under no obligation to host anything. To them it's simpler to do the take down than to step forward and fight legal battles on the behalf of someone else.

Re:Myles is correct.

[Anonymous Coward]

It's exactly the point of DMCA process that hoster doesn't have to fight legal battles as long as they follow the procedure (and procedure doesn't stop at "receive DMCA notice - take down content").

Re:Myles is correct.

[Anonymous Coward]

Sorry bro, that's not how the DMCA works.

Re:Myles is correct.

[Anonymous Coward]

'(and procedure doesn't stop at "receive DMCA notice - take down content").'
Unfortunatly that often seems to be the de facto procedure even if it isn't de jure.

Re:Myles is correct.

[Anonymous Coward]

In the USA (not where I live, IANAL) I believe fair use is based on the constitutional amendment granting free speech so could be said to be an "inalienable right"

Re:Myles is correct.

[squiggleslash]

Google (or any hosting provider) is obliged, under the DMCA, to pull his video unless he submits that counter-claim, or else face liability should the copyright holder want to sue. While you and I can pontificate as much as we want as to whether it's fair use (and we're probably right), most hosting providers, as a matter of policy, would rather not be dragged into court and risk losing in the first place.

Issuing the counter claim would protect his hosting provider (in this case, Google.) It bothers me that he's not doing this, yet the tone of the article is that Google is at fault for pulling it.

Re:Myles is correct.

[mysidia]

Google (or any hosting provider) is obliged, under the DMCA,

Not obliged. Expeditious removal is just a condition of the DMCA's special liability exclusions, AND not having those exclusions does not automatically make Google liable for any potential infringement ---- it reverts conditions to what they were before passage of the DMCA.

The DMCA's liability exclusions which are of questionable value anyways, since copyright holders have already sued and won against service providers and file sharing sites that MET the DMCA's safe harbor requirements.

Re:Myles is correct.

[Anonymous Coward]

The DMCA is a piece of trash to begin with.

Re:Myles is correct.

[squiggleslash]

Not obliged. Expeditious removal is just

Try responding to the entire comment, which talks about Google facing liability in the lawsuit that it doesn't if it removes the file. That is true.

since copyright holders have already sued and won against service providers and file sharing sites that MET the DMCA's safe harbor requirements.

Yes and no. File sharing sites set up specifically facilitate copyright theft have found that a dubious "DMCA compliance" system that's easily bypassed by, for example, allowing every file to have an infinite number of URL aliases (oron.com/file/123. oron.com/file/123/hotlusybabes.flv, oron.com/file/123/hotlustybabes.flv?welcome=1, server-1.oron.com/file/123/) removing only those mentioned by the copyright holder, have found judges are not stupid. Illegal sites are illegal, even if they pretend to be compliant with some laws.

Youtube.com is a fairly neutral hoster of videos that both makes a good faith attempt to comply with the DMCA, has legitimate uses, includes features designed to make it less useful for piracy (such as the 10 minute video limit), and is used mostly legitimately (like BitTorrent, not like Napster) with people using it to share self-produced content more than any other type of content. As long as it complies with the DMCA judges will side with it.

Re:Myles is correct.

[almitydave]

'(and procedure doesn't stop at "receive DMCA notice - take down content").'
Unfortunatly that often seems to be the de facto procedure even if it isn't de jure.

YouTube has gone above and beyond DMCA requirements to grant copyright holders special powers - see the many previous discussions here about ContentID false positives and people being unable to restore their videos because some unrelated party adamantly maintains copyright ownership. It's legal, because YouTube holds up the "take down content" part of the DMCA, but they're not required to restore content as they're not a public forum.

I believe YouTube implemented these systems as a way to attract (MP|RI)AA business. See http://www.youtube.com/user/movies and http://www.youtube.com/user/YouTubeShowsUS.

Re:Myles is correct.

[cgimusic]

Except constitutional free speech only applies to the government. YouTube can prevent you from saying whatever they want.

Stop using Youtube

[Anonymous Coward]

Automated perjury with no repercussions? Please.

Re:Stop using Youtube

[Sowelu]

The guy who was filing the complaints commented on the site. So maybe he's a dick, sure. But if you're willing to give him good faith for his complaint--solely in the capacity that he honestly believes that the video oversteps fair use, and is violating copyright--then he did follow correct procedure.

He tried contacting the guy quite a few times (or so he claims), and after getting no response, he filed the takedown request personally, not through some automated thing. If he has good reason to honestly believe that his rights were violated, it wasn't even perjury. Strangely enough that's what I would do if I thought someone was violating my copyright.

Claiming fair use for informational purposes is really shaky ground. There's a lot of "I know it when I see it", and people like to stretch the definition on either side. I haven't seen the video so I don't know how long the clips are, but if they are too long then yes it's a violation, and I suspect that (much like with parody) there's a line between "informational purposes" and "openly hostile" that the law says you shouldn't cross. Does it cross the line? Hell if I know, but the guy sounds like he's at least justified in filing a claim. Whether a court would find it reasonable or not is up to them, but jackasses get to protect their own rights too.

Re:Stop using Youtube

[K. S. Kyosuke]

He tried contacting the guy quite a few times (or so he claims), and after getting no response, he filed the takedown request personally, not through some automated thing. If he has good reason to honestly believe that his rights were violated, it wasn't even perjury.

If he actually didn't try to take down any straight copy of those videos on YouTube, and went after one video using pieces of his work as commented-on quotations, it's at least highly suspicious, don't you think?

Re:Stop using Youtube

[Purity Of Essence]

Automated perjury with no repercussions? Please.

If he has good reason to honestly believe that his rights were violated, it wasn't even perjury.

The perjury clause only applies when the claimant is not the owner of the original content or a legal representative for them. Whether or not the new content infringes -- in belief or in fact -- has no bearing on the matter. There is no penalty for flagging any and all content, no matter how clear its fair-use.

Re:Stop using Youtube

[king neckbeard]

I'm pretty sure that there is no precedent that makes it clear that claimants DO have to consider fair use, other wise there would be an enormous threat of undermining the first amendment.

Re:Stop using Youtube

[king neckbeard]

correction: there is NOW precedent

Re:Stop using Youtube

[Arker]

Not at all. A straight copy simply means an opportunity for more people to see his work, which authors normally want. On the other hand someone taking it apart and cutting it up, 'remixing' it to make the author look bad (and whether you think it's justified or not that is clearly what was done) is not something the author normally wants to see.

So no, not suspicious at all, perfectly normal and expected.

The real question here is whether the hostile piece does fall within fair use or not, and that is unfortunately a very complicated legal question, ultimately based on somewhat subjective criteria, so it's not easy to know for sure. It may well require a court to make that determination, which means a lot of lawyer fees for both of the gentlemen involved.

Re:Stop using Youtube

[Purity Of Essence]

If you can find such precedent, I would very much like to see it. Thanks.

Re:Stop using Youtube

[Arker]

"If he doesn't enforce his copyright fairly he loses period. You can't pick and choose."

Wrong.

You're thinking of Trademark. Copyright does not work the same way.

How do your words taste now? A little bitter? Need some salt?

Re:Stop using Youtube

[Anonymous Coward]

a) That's trademark law, not copyright.
b) Get help. Really.

Re:Stop using Youtube

[Anonymous Coward]

You stupid fucker.

If he doesn't enforce his copyright fairly he loses period. You can't pick and choose.

Dumb cunt.

Amazing. There was clearly a part of you that realized how stupid your post was, both before and after you typed it up, yet you hit submit anyway.

Re:Stop using Youtube

[Anonymous Coward]

Perjury applies when he knows the content isn't his and claims it is.

Commentary over the top of snippets to show where the false statements are and showing examples of ridiculous claims do not belong to the original copyright holder and therefor this person knowingly filed false claims.

In other words, he perjured his ass off and deserves to lose his copyrights entirely (not to mention spending time in prison for potentially causing AIDS patients to die because of his horrific false claims)

Re:Stop using Youtube

[Anonymous Coward]

suspect that (much like with parody) there's a line between "informational purposes" and "openly hostile" that the law says you shouldn't cross

No there isn't; please see my other comment. American's fair use rights stem from their constitutional right to comment. A continued openly hostile commentry on a film, particularly one which comments against every part of the film it shows, will greatly strengthen your claim to fair use. The entire point is that political debate must be allowed to continue or otherwise the copyright laws would be unconstitutional.

Re:Stop using Youtube

[Anonymous Coward]

You are correct, but the flamebait douchery was unnecessary.

Re:Stop using Youtube

[K. S. Kyosuke]

'remixing' it to make the author look bad

...is usually called "academic discourse" where I come from. :D

and whether you think it's justified or not that is clearly what was done

Not only is it justified, it's been done for centuries now.

not something the author normally wants to see

Of course, nobody in academia wants people to know that he's wrong, but the interests of the public always win big time in such cases.

Re:Stop using Youtube

[Anonymous Coward]

But if you're willing to give him good faith for his complaint--solely in the capacity that he honestly believes that the video oversteps fair use, and is violating copyright--then he did follow correct procedure.

The whole concept of "guilty unless proven innocent" takedowns is disgusting to begin with. The real reason Youtube has these systems in place is to avoid real DMCA takedowns and automate the whole process. We need to strike down these parts of the DMCA and get rid of these foul takedowns for good.

Re:Stop using Youtube

[gIobaljustin]

Free speech is far from just about politician debate; it's about every sort of speech, including opinions about 'trivial' matters.

Re:Stop using Youtube

[Anonymous Coward]

So no, not suspicious at all, perfectly normal and expected.

Perfectly normal and expected - but absolutely not what copyright is supposed to support.

Non-story

[jklovanc]

From the article;

YouTube said that Power's account, which has more than 20,000 subscribers, will be removed on 18 February unless they receive a counter-notification disputing these claims against him by that date.

All they have to do is follow the law, file a counter-notification and this all goes away. The summary makes it look like YouTube is the bad guy when all they are doing is following the law and acting on the DMCA claims. It is up to the alleged infringer to counter-claim not the service provider.

He says his movies do not breach copyright laws because his films are educational and therefore fair use.

Tell that to YouTube and the story is over.

Re:Non-story

[rahvin112]

Tell that to YouTube and the story is over.

Google doesn't care. They breach their immunity if they don't follow the DMCA process, which involves the counter-notice. He shouldn't tell them anything, he should send in the proper counter-notice and make the denialists sue him then trounce them in court along with counter-suit for damages and legal fees.

If he's not willing to defend what he produced he just doesn't care enough.

Re:Non-story

[arbiter1]

Sadly you are that dumb it seems. that process takes weeks if they find the DMCA claim to be fake. Even if they find them fair use and put them back up they can be taken down again by another bs DMCA claim and process starts over again.

Re:Non-story

[Anonymous Coward]

You know who decides if a counter-claim is valid? The complaintant.

You know what provides grounds for a bank-account-draining lawsuit? A counter-claim.

Re:Non-story

[arbiter1]

Problem might not fact he don't care, its having the $ to fight it. Since you can't rely on court awarding legal fee's.

Re:Non-story

[gnasher719]

Google doesn't have to find anything fair use. The only thing they need is to receive a counter notice. With a counter notice, Google can put the video back, and whatever copyright infringement happened or hasn't happened has nothing to do with Google.

Re:Non-story

[bugnuts]

Right. If you have enough copyright claims against you that are not disputed, youtube will simply remove your account.

This guy pissed off some folks who are making claims in bad faith, but if you're sure you're not violating the law you need to state so in a counter claim. At that point, it's no longer legal to file further DMCA takedown notices on the same material, and they have to take you to court to proceed. Multiple claims on the same clip are considered misrepresentation. This is why it's suspicious to me that he received multiple takedown requests from one source, but maybe it was for different episodes.

Youtube is threatening to remove his account due to multiple unresolved dmca claims. Resolve them, and it goes away. It has little to do with AIDS deniers, except that they're tertiarily involved.

Re:Non-story

[jklovanc]

He shouldn't tell them anything, he should send in the proper counter-notice

The reason why the films do not infringe is part of a proper counter-notice.

Re:Non-story

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't you know that it's the fault of corporations or big government when people aren't lead around by the dick?
 
Just like Big Pharma is to blame for chain smokers and the obese.

Re:Non-story

[jklovanc]

Starting with a personal attack does not help your case.

that process takes weeks if they find the DMCA claim to be fake.

This shows how little you know about the DMCA process. The provider does not make any determination. All they do is put the material back up unless the original claimant files suit and notifies the service provider. It is up to the courts to determine infringement not the service provider. By not filing a counter-notice the poster is not following the procedure.

As for subsequent claims that can be ignored as duplicates.

Re:Non-story

[sumdumass]

Thats right. And they have 14 days to put the content back up after the counter claim else google doesn't get the automatic protections from damages in the DMCA from taking the content down. However, i believe their TOS already protects them.

Re:Non-story

[king neckbeard]

There's also the fact that even with a counter-notice, the debunking stays down for at least 10 days.

Re:Non-story

[AK Marc]

No, it doesn't work that way. The same person can't issue a takedown for the same thing repeatedly. Claim, counter-claim, then it's up forever until sued for. The same person can't continue to re-file. And they can't get someone to file for them without risking running afoul of the rules on claims only being made by copyright holders.

Re:Non-story

[AK Marc]

Nope. Just like the take-down is unverified, the counter-claim is also unverified. It does open up the poster to legal liabilities, but no more than the initial post. DMCA is about protecting the hosting entity, not the poster or copyright holder.

Re:Non-story

[Luckyo]

Unfortunately we are not talking about DMCA, but youtube TOS, which is notorious for not giving a damn about users and only being interested in covering its own ass against potential liability.

Re:Non-story

[jklovanc]

Wrong. The courts decides which claim is valid. The third step, after claim and counter-claim, is filing a lawsuit. If that suit is not filed the file goes back up.

A counter-claim only provides grounds of it is false or inaccurate.

Re:Non-story

[AK Marc]

The TOS being complained about here is that if you don't defend your takedowns, then YouTube presumes you are a habitual offender, and it's easier for them to ban you permanently. If you post "questionable" content, be prepared to counter-notice. If you are going to post and run, then be prepared for the punishment when you violate the TOS.

There's no liability for YouTube here at all. They get notice, it comes down. They get counter-notice it comes back up. YouTube *Can't* be sued for that. They (could possibly, but highly unlikely) be sued for encouraging violations, and to prevent that, if you don't counter-claim they will eventually ban you.

Seems reasonable enough to me.

Re:Non-story

[Luckyo]

You're quite clueless on the topic I see. Youtube's policy on takedowns goes above and beyond DMCA in an effort to placate large copyright holders. Complaint maker is in fact the person evaluating the counter claim and he can simply deny it. There is no recourse other than to sue after that, and even that would not be a guarantee of getting your video back on youtube - you could only sue for damages. Youtube itself is a private entity that has a right to take down anyone's video at any time for any reason it pleases.

When nintendo filed a wholesale bunch of claims on bigger "let's play" channels a few months ago, nothing saved those channels. They were killed regardless of counter claims because nintendo as the one who made the claim simply denied all the counter claims.

Re:Non-story

[Opportunist]

In the unholy trinity (sex, drugs and copyright) you can't even rely on court to follow the law, considering that there are almost more contradictions than in the Bible.

Re:Non-story

[bidule]

This guy pissed off some folks who are making claims in bad faith,

I am not sure it's that black and white.

I watched the 16 minutes first part. There are maybe 2 minutes of original video at the start and 2 more minutes of a Foo Fighter music video, leaving about 10 minutes of House of Number material.

He really did a convincing work on the montage and the voice-over, but NPOV must agree the majority of the video came from the deniers. Now I don't know how far fair use goes, but maybe they really have a case there. How did MST3K handle that?

Re:Non-story

[Rich0]

That is Youtube's fault. I'm not aware of any DMCA provision that requires the site to stay down for 10 days even after a counter-notice is filed.

Re:Non-story

[Anonymous Coward]

You are incorrect. Please read the law, taking special care to avoid common misunderstandings.

Re:Non-story

[Anonymous Coward]

You know what provides grounds for a bank-account-draining lawsuit? A counter-claim.

Nope.

Oh really... lets test your hypothesis, shall we?

I file a DMCA takedown on something of yours.
You file the appropriate counter-claim to have it put back up.
I sue you into oblivion because my bank account is larger than yours.

Looks like your wrong. Now, if you would like to backtrack and claim "oh, what I actually meant was that the AIDS denialist can't possibly have the funds to do that", then I await your retcon.

Re:Non-story

[jklovanc]

The fact that there was commentary over almost all of the video makes it fair use. There is a very old case that makes this clear.
Folsom v. Marsh

no one can doubt that a reviewer may fairly cite largely from the original work, if his design be really and truly to use the passages for the purposes of fair and reasonable criticism. On the other hand, it is as clear, that if he thus cites the most important parts of the work, with a view, not to criticise, but to supersede the use of the original work, and substitute the review for it, such a use will be deemed in law a piracy.

It is clear that the vidios are criticism and do not supersede the original work.

Re:Non-story

[AK Marc]

Then YouTube isn't DMCA compliant, and is openeing themselves up to liability, even if the content was "illegal". I'd heard it described as DMCA compliant, and don't host anything questionable enough to find out on my own. DMCA doesn't allow a counter-claim to be evaluated. The reason it takes 14 days for a counter-claim to re-instate a work is to give the complaintant time to file a restraining order. If YouTube doesn't follow that, they can be successfully sued by a poster, even if the poster posted illegal works.

Re:Non-story

[Fnord666]

He really did a convincing work on the montage and the voice-over, but NPOV must agree the majority of the video came from the deniers. Now I don't know how far fair use goes, but maybe they really have a case there. How did MST3K handle that?

None of which is any concern of Youtube. They have absolutely nothing to say about fair use or not. They follow the letter of the law as written and preserve their Safe Harbor protections under the DMCA. Youtube's actions are out of their hands on both sides unless they are willing to jump into the fray and assume liability.

Re:Non-story

[jklovanc]

I file a DMCA takedown on something of yours.
You file the appropriate counter-claim to have it put back up.
I sue you into oblivion because my bank account is larger than yours.

I get friends from the EFF and other anti-censorship groups to fund trial.
We submit a simple motion for summary judgement based on fair use as commentary citing Folsom v. Marsh. The almost continual voice over makes it obvious commentary.
You lose trial and I am awarded costs.
Your bank account is much smaller.

Re:Non-story

[Luckyo]

DMCA "compliant" means that it's protected from copyright holders. Not that it grants rights to people posting videos. You appear to think that "DMCA compliant" means "follows DMCA to the letter, including all the rights granted to consumers". You could not be more wrong on the matter.

What it actually means is "it satisfies the party that can actually try to remove safe harbour status and sue for damages based on lack of it". I.e. copyright holders. People who are posting videos on youtube are not a part of the "protected" group in any way shape or form as they are not ones who are involved in status of "safe harbour". The only people against whom "safe harbour" protection matters after all, are copyright holders.

So it is indeed DMCA compliant as to maintain its safe harbour status, while being against both letter and spirit of DMCA when it comes to protection of video posters.

Re:Non-story

[Luckyo]

To be specific. They will follow the counter claim. But counter claim is reviewed by the one who made the claim, who can simply reject the counter claim. Poster of the video has no legal leg to stand on, as youtube is a private service that claims a right to remove any video for any reason it deems necessary. It has not obligation whatsoever to the poster to keep their videos up.

Re:Non-story

[Paradise Pete]

How did MST3K handle that?

In a straight-forward way. They paid money. That's one of the reasons they used the movies they did; they were cheap to use.

Re:Non-story

[tepples]

Content ID (Nintendo's use of automated detection of game cut scenes in Let's Play videos) and OCILLA notices of claimed infringement are two separate systems. I've faced both, and YouTube's OCILLA process is pretty much point-for-point 17 USC 512. Your beef is with Content ID.

Re:Non-story

[Anonymous Coward]

Wrong.
YouTube can remove content for any or no reason, read the TOS.
So they are perfectly in the clear when they "reinstate" content due to a DMCA counter-notice and immediately remove it again "because.".

Re:Non-story

[Anonymous Coward]

Looks like your wrong.

My wrong what? And how do you even know I have a wrong that looks like that?

Re:Non-story

[Anonymous Coward]

Legal fee's what? What belongs to the fee?

Re:Non-story

[Luckyo]

The process is exactly the same for both. The only difference is that content ID allows automatic matching, whereas claims are done manually. Both the process of making the claim and rejecting it remain largely the same.

I'm guessing you simply were facing someone who caved or wasn't serious about their claims. If someone makes a serious claim and can provide proof that they do indeed own the copyright, the only tool available to you as a poster is to stir up negative publicity and hope that is enough to make the claimant withdraw the claim or not reject your counter claim. Otherwise, you're out of luck, as claimant will simply reject your counter claim and copyright strike and takedown on your account and video will remain in force.

This has been and will continue to function as an excellent tool for censorship on youtube. It functioned this way before contentid was ever introduced on youtube, and will likely continue to function this way for foreseeable future. In fact, a lot of "personalities" that make money off youtube have been banging the drums about this problem for a long time now with no effect. Google simply doesn't give a damn.

Re:Non-story

[jklovanc]

That is a problem only if it actually gets to court. Filing a counter-claim costs nothing and the copyright holder may not file as it is obvious there is no infringement. Many copyright holders will file the first step of the process but never file with a court. The know that can scare some people into submission. Just follow the process, stand up to the bullies and they slink away.
Even if it goes to court there are many organisation such as the EFF which will fund this kind of defense. I bet many AIDS groups would fund defense of those videos. There is also a good chance that a motion for summary judgement citing Folsom V. Marsh will make a very short case.

Re:Non-story

[Anonymous Coward]

The summary makes it look like YouTube is the bad guy when all they are doing is following the law and acting on the DMCA claims

I would tend to agree with you if Youtube was only planning on removing the actual video. Taking action against the entire account which hosted it has nothing at all to do with the DMCA and is fully on Youtube.

Re:Non-story

[gl4ss]

it's not a court claim..

basically, the counter claim in this case is just an email. as was the original claims too.

since it's free to make dmca notices assholes will use them to censor other people.

Re:Non-story

[mysidia]

No, it doesn't work that way. The same person can't issue a takedown for the same thing repeatedly. Claim, counter-claim, then it's up forever until sued for.

In reality.... they probably can, and Google is unlikely to notice that it's the same person that issued the second notice. The same copyright holder may also have a second agent acting on their behalf to send the second takedown notice.

Nothing prevents them from sending the second letter. Nothing prevents Google from making the mistake of failing to realize that the second letter was ultimately related to the same work claimed to be infringed, and the same alleged infringement.

Re:Non-story

[mysidia]

Otherwise, you're out of luck, as claimant will simply reject your counter claim and copyright strike and takedown on your account and video will remain in force.

You may be able to sue the copyright holder for tortious interference in this case, and seek a court order for Google to disregard their malicious activity and reinstate the video.

Re:Non-story

[jklovanc]

You do not understand the process at all. Here are the steps.
1. DMCA take down notice. Content comes down.
2. DMCA counter Notice. Content goes up in 10-14 days unless step 3 is done.
3. Original complainant file suit in court and notifies content provider with case number.

Complaint maker is in fact the person evaluating the counter claim

False. The courts evaluate the claim after step 3. The content provider can to put the content back up based on the existence of a counter claim and be free of liability.

There is no recourse other than to sue after that, and even that would not be a guarantee of getting your video back on youtube

You don't have to sue to get your content up. They have to sue to keep your content down.

When nintendo filed a wholesale bunch of claims on bigger "let's play" channels a few months ago.

You should really look into your example before posting it. The Nintendo/"lets Play" issue has nothing at all to do with DMCA. Nintendo did not file take down notices but filed claims against advertisement revenue. The videos were not taken down. The revenue just didn't go to the video producer.

Re:Non-story

[Anonymous Coward]

Go and read up on YouTube.

This is how YouTube implements the DMCA:

Receives Notice from Claimant.
Takes down video
Receives Counter-Notice.
10 days later Video Goes up
Counter-Notice is reviewed by claimant. If denied, Video goes down.

The DMCA is a safe-harbor for content publishers from copyright holders. It enumerates provisions that a company must provide a copyright holder in order to maintain safe-harbor status.

What that means is; if you are an accused infringer, if YouTube wants safe-harbor; then at a minimum they must follow your guide (repost the video, and wait for the courts to sort it out).

But YouTube have a term of service with the accused infringer, which they interpret as: if the claimant denies your counter-notice the video goes. Thats it. They are still safe from Copyright-Holders suing (Compliant with all parts of the DMCA that requires CopyrightHolder interaction), YouTube is safe from Accused Infringer from suing (due to the TOS). YouTube wins.
Copyright holder wins.
Accused infringer (guilty or not) generally loses.

Before you reply and write the same wrong thing again, WE KNOW the intent of the DMCA is being breached, but breached in a way that YouTube is entirely within their rights to do. (no one forces youTube to host content it doesn't want to).

Re:Non-story

[Anonymous Coward]

Not according to the way YouTube runs it. They have a TOS that says they can pull it down if they want.

They want means "when the claimant reviews the counter-claim".

Sue YouTube all you want but you agreed to the terms when you uploaded your video.

Re:Non-story

[Anonymous Coward]

Google can ignore the 14 day limit and just not put the material back up at all if they want to, unless they were hosting the material under some contract. The bit in 512(g) is not about losing protection from DMCA damages, but that the host is not liable for breaking contract or other promises for responding to a take down request. If the host has no obligations, such as most free hosting sites that can take stuff down at any time for any reason, then it has no need to put things back up in that time scale or at all.

Re:Non-story

[Anonymous Coward]

The person who's work is being taken down might notice however.

Re:Non-story

[Anonymous Coward]

You could probably make a case of them having a special duty due to market dominance. They've got in trouble in the EU over search results due to market position. I know the DMCA is USA law but isn't there some process to complain of free speech violation due to their TOS and market dominance. Going to court to sue is expensive, sending a letter asking them for comment isn't. If they refuse to reply to you, ask your congressman/senator to send them a letter asking them the same.

Re:Non-story

[Luckyo]

At this point in time, not a single such case has been known to exist, much less be won.

Re:Non-story

[Luckyo]

To reiterate the point: Read youtube TOS. It's exceptionally unlikely that court will throw entire TOS out and force a private service to host a video it does not want to host. There's little to no legal leg to stand on in that claim.

If there were, it would have been tried. Some of the bigger channels hit by this have entire crews behind them and make six and even seven digits a year. They would have taken the legal route if it was available to them, as this is an existential matter to them.

Re:Non-story

[Luckyo]

You would be arguing that both US and EU should be selectively applied in your favour, with EU law being somewhat vague and unclear on the matter.

You are extremely unlikely to win such an argument in court of law.

Re:Non-story

[laird]

Filing a counter-claim is a one-page form that doesn't cost anything. I can understand why he's using the sleazy DMCA takedown tactic to get some publicity for his films. But I can't understand why he doesn't send a counter-claim to YouTube so his videos stay up. Perhaps he wants to draw things out to generate more debate?

Re:Non-story

[AmiMoJo]

Normally there is a button you can click on the YouTube site that says you challenge the claim. There is a scary legal warning about opening yourself up to lawsuits, but it used to be the case that clicking it restored your video instantly. I don't know if that is still the case.

Re:Non-story

[gIobaljustin]

The real bad guy is the DMCA. Get rid of this DMCA takedown nonsense for good.

Re:Non-story

[bidule]

That makes it clear, thank you.

Re:Non-story

[Anonymous Coward]

In my opinion, a DMCA counterclaim to a copyright troll should also cite Arkell v. Pressdam.

Re:Non-story

[Anonymous Coward]

Since you can't rely on court awarding legal fee's.

You also can't keep semiliterate greengrocers off of nerd sites. Maybe that's a good thing, are you open to being educated, arbiter?

Learn the language, people, and I mean WRITTEN language, which is far more precise and expressive than spoken English. Read a book once in a while -- you don't see grocer's apostrophes in books. Only in written communication by the unread and uneducated.

And you and those five moderators who probabaly also run grocery stores don't realize how lawyers work. You don't pay if they don't take the case, they usually won't take the case unless they're sure they'll win, and they get a cut of your winnings.

We're not talking about defending yourself against murder, defending yourself against criminal charges is indeed bankbreaking. Also, since you're a greengrocer and not a nerd I doubt you've ever heard of teh Electronic Frontier Foundation, he has a damned good shot with them.

WAY over modded, guys. Where did all my fellow nerds go?

Re:Non-story

[ShakaUVM]

>All they have to do is follow the law, file a counter-notification and this all goes away. The summary makes it look like YouTube is the bad guy when all they are doing is following the law and acting on the DMCA claims. It is up to the alleged infringer to counter-claim not the service provider.

YouTube *is* the bad guy. They don't even look at counter-claims most of the time, they just automatically side with the person filing the takedown notice. It's happened to me (when I had permission to use a song, and wrote that in the counter-claim) and there's a classical musician on Reddit who has had hostile DMCA claims filed against his own performances of Bach pieces that have been taken down.

It's only if you make a really big stink, or sue I suppose, that you'll get a human to actually look at it and correct the problem.

Google/YouTube is actually proud of the fact that 99% of the DMCA system is automated. This degenerate behavior is "Working As Intended".

Re:Non-story

[Shagg]

Does YouTube honor counter-claims?

Re:Non-story

[Shagg]

On what grounds can a poster sue YouTube for not allowing them to post?

Re:Non-story

[david_thornley]

You seem to be missing the point of the DMCA procedure. It isn't mandatory. It's a safe harbor provision. If YouTube gets a DMCA takedown notice, and they don't take down the object of the notice, they can be held liable for copyright infringement. If YouTube gets a counterclaim, and they don't put the video back up, they can be held liable for any breach of contract or other failure to live up to an obligation by the person who posted the video.

Thing is, most (all?) YouTube submissions do not involve a contract. There is no legal obligation for YouTube to keep any particular material online. They can restore the video on receipt of a counterclaim, but there is no legal obligation to do that, just as there was no legal obligation to accept the video in the first place.

Re:Non-story

[jklovanc]

Yes they do. They have a procedure to easily put them in too but you have to have a video with a claim against it to use it.

Re:Non-story

[jklovanc]

What is your alternative to this that will allow copyright holders to effctivly remove their material from infringing sites?

It is very easy to point at something and say it is wrong. It is much harder to come up with a better solution.

Re:Non-story

[jklovanc]

YouTube *is* the bad guy. They don't even look at counter-claims most of the time,

Yet another person who does not understand the DMCA process. YouTube makes not determination at all and therefore has no need to look at the submissions. From YouTube;'s point of view the DMCA process has up to 3 steps.
1. Take down notice filed. The content comes down.
2. Counter-notice file. Content goes up in 10-14 days unless step 3 is done.
3. Original claimant files suit in court and informs provider of case number.
When a take down notice is filed the content has to come down. That is the law. When a counter claim is filed the content must go back up unless a suit is filed. That is also the law. There is no taking sides on the part of YouTube. The mere existence of a take down notice and possibly counter claim cause things to happen. It is up to the courts, not YouTube, to decide the voracity of the claims.

classical musician on Reddit who has had hostile DMCA claims filed against his own performances of Bach pieces that have been taken down

Did he file a counter notice? Did his content go back up or was he sued?
If you do not file a counter notice your content does not go back up. It is as simple as that.

Re:Non-story

[gIobaljustin]

My solution would be to force them to go to court every single time. Is it "better"? I certainly think so, and you'll find that I'm no friend of copyright.

Re:Non-story

[jklovanc]

Going to court every time has the following issues;
1. Places an undue burden on the court system. There would be thousands of cases clogging the courts. There are already suspects going free because the courts are clogged.
2. Small copyright holders would have to spend thousands of dollars defending obvious copyright infringement.
3. It would take months, if not years, to get to court and by that time the damage has already been done.
4. Take down notices are evidence in court used to establish the clam and sometimes the falsehood of the claim.

you'll find that I'm no friend of copyright.

So your bias against copyright leads to a "solution" that is not effective and can damage the court system. I am curious, why don't you like copyright?

I am not saying that DMCA is perfect. I believe that it needs improvement, mainly in the area of automated and/or false take down notices, but getting rid of it is also not the solution. Perhaps if more people advocated for change rather than removal of the DMCA things would improve.

Re:Non-story

[gIobaljustin]

1. Places an undue burden on the court system.

I would rather have that than have this guilty unless proven innocent (or guilty-until-you-fight-back) nonsense. And I see this as a good thing, as it would likely mean that only the more serious cases would be handled. But again, justice > safety.

Website owners should always have safe harbor, and there should be no take down notices. Holding website owners responsible for the actions of users simply because they decided not to remove something on someone's mere request is quite unjust.

2. Small copyright holders would have to spend thousands of dollars defending obvious copyright infringement.

Yes, and? No one is under any obligation to give them a way to subvert the justice system.

3. It would take months, if not years, to get to court and by that time the damage has already been done.

Even if I pretend the damage exists, again, I do not see this as a problem.

4. Take down notices are evidence in court used to establish the clam and sometimes the falsehood of the claim.

There are numerous ways to accomplish that without having takedown notices that jeopardize a website's safe harbor.

So your bias against copyright leads to a "solution" that is not effective and can damage the court system.

So your bias in favor of copyright leads to a "solution" that is not effective (It really isn't.) and is unjust.

I am curious, why don't you like copyright?

Haven't we been through this before, as you already pointed out?

Re:Non-story

[jklovanc]

Haven't we been through this before, as you already pointed out?

Sorry, I didn't recognize you name. For anyone else reading this, you believe that freedom of speech is inviolate and that colours everything you think about copyright. You are unrealistic and there is no use talking.

What is an "AIDS denialist"?

[Anonymous Coward]

What does this mean exactly? Does it deny that AIDS exists? Does it deny that HIV leads to AIDS? Does it deny that non-gay people or non-Africans can get AIDS? Does it say it's all a government conspiracy and really caused by chemtrails?

One way or another, it doesn't sound like something that warrants debunking, but then again, I'm often surprised at just how stupid people can be.

Re:What is an "AIDS denialist"?

[iced_773]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AIDS_denialism

Pretty much one or more of the above - it comes in different varieties. There are some flavors of denialism in Africa that claim the West even artificially created HIV to wipe out all black Africans.

Re:What is an "AIDS denialist"?

[rasmusbr]

What does this mean exactly? Does it deny that AIDS exists? Does it deny that HIV leads to AIDS? Does it deny that non-gay people or non-Africans can get AIDS? Does it say it's all a government conspiracy and really caused by chemtrails?

One way or another, it doesn't sound like something that warrants debunking, but then again, I'm often surprised at just how stupid people can be.

It's not possible to find a single party line, but these are the most common beliefs AFAIK:

AIDS is caused by chemicals, big pharma, the government, the Bilderberg group, the Illuminati, space lizards, etc.
HIV either does not exist, or exists and is harmless, or exists and is harmful and created by evil men in their evil laboratories but does not cause AIDS.
Chemtrails could totally cause AIDS, but more evidence is needed. In other words some dude on the internet needs to write a speculative blogpost that claims that chemtrails cause AIDS before we can say with certainty that it does.

If you think this is harmless stupidity, think again. IIRC there is at least one case of an HIV positive mother who refused to test her child. The child later died in an illness with symptoms like those of someone who has AIDS. The mother also died, naturally.

Re:What is an "AIDS denialist"?

[Anonymous Coward]

IIRC there is at least one case of an HIV positive mother who refused to test her child. The child later died in an illness with symptoms like those of someone who has AIDS. The mother also died, naturally.

That sounds a lot like Christine Maggiore

Which just happens to be one of the main figures in House of Numbers, and her backstory is brought up in part 1 of the videos in question...

http://www.dailymotion.com/sci...

Re:What is an "AIDS denialist"?

[rossdee]

So which type of denier is the guy in question?

Re:What is an "AIDS denialist"?

[ne0n]

thx @JustineSacco for TRUE FACT: whites protected from AIDS by skin tone #FuckBeta

Re:What is an "AIDS denialist"?

[iced_773]

What, you expected me to RTFA? Are you new here or something? :P

Re:What is an "AIDS denialist"?

[Arker]

"Denialist" is obviously a slur word, your suspicious side should perk up the moment you hear it.

In this case, it is used to refer to anyone that doubts the pronouncement that HIV=AIDS. Several prominent researchers have fell into that category from the day that conclusion was announced.

There are several different alternative hypotheses, for instance Duesberg argues that HIV is harmless, a very weak virus that is found only in the blood of people experiencing immune collapse (for some other reason) because a healthy immune system wipes it out immediately. Just an opportunistic infection that can be used as a diagnostic.

On the other hand, the Perth group IIRC actually argues that there is no such thing as HIV at all. They challenge the claim that it's ever been properly isolated, and the best I recall they basically argue that what is being detected as HIV is simply cellular trash of a kind typical of an individual with severely compromised immunities.

Re:What is an "AIDS denialist"?

[SpankiMonki]

And Liam Scheff is one of the more virulent practitioners of the art. This is the guy who infamously wrote about the Incarnation Children's Center:

"The drugs given to the children are toxic, known to cause genetic mutation, organ failure, bone marrow death, bodily deformations, brain damage and fatal skin disorders. If the children refuse the drugs, they’re held down and force fed. Should they continue to resist, they’re taken to Columbia University Presbyterian hospital, where a surgeon puts a plastic tube through their abdominal wall into their stomachs. The drugs are injected directly into their intestines. In 2003, two children, ages 6 and 12, had debilitating strokes due to drug toxicities. The 6-year-old went blind and they both died shortly after. Another 14 year old died later and an 8-year-old boy had two plastic surgeries to remove large, fatty, drug-induced lumps from his neck."

The NY State Department of Health investigated and found nothing to substantiate Scheff's claims.

Scheff is a complete nut-job, and a dangerous one at that. Scheff pointing fingers and crying "propaganda" is chutzpah at a pathological level.

Re:What is an "AIDS denialist"?

[Anonymous Coward]

This actually sounds a lot like *harmful* stupidity...

Re:What is an "AIDS denialist"?

[Anonymous Coward]

Thing about denialism and other bad science and psuedoscience is that they don't discard their hypotheses when they're demonstrated to be false.

Re:What is an "AIDS denialist"?

[Arker]

And the thing about the priests of scientism is that they once they feel confident in a conclusion it becomes like a religious dogma. Once they have a council and get all the archbishops to agree on this conclusion it is in their eyes forever true and beyond question.

More than that, not just ordinary truth, but an ineffable, infallible truth, the very essence of all that is good. And anyone that questions it is thus promoting all that is evil, so these priests of course believe they are perfectly justified in using any and all means necessary to choke out the unbelievers, the skeptics - making it virtually impossible to fund and carry out research that does not explicitly accept and assume that conclusion. Which makes it exceedingly difficult to prove their hypothesis false, of course. Good for their personal positions, but very bad for science itself.

Because Science is not a secular religion. Science is a method for ascertaining reality. One that presumes and requires the very skepticism that the priests fight as a mortal enemy.

Re:What is an "AIDS denialist"?

[RDW]

If you think this is harmless stupidity, think again. IIRC there is at least one case of an HIV positive mother who refused to test her child. The child later died in an illness with symptoms like those of someone who has AIDS. The mother also died, naturally.

And that's just the tip of the iceberg. In South Africa, HIV denialists advised by the Duesberg cult were in charge of public health policy for several years, leading to a tragedy of genocidal proportions:

http://www.theguardian.com/wor...

Re:What is an "AIDS denialist"?

[Anonymous Coward]

I feel sorry for the child, but at least natural selection (wrt intelligence/gullibility) is getting rid of some of the stupid.

Sometimes I think there needs to be a rudimentary test before allowing parents legal guardianship of their offspring.

Re:What is an "AIDS denialist"?

[Anonymous Coward]

Paranoid rants about your scientismist boogeymen are of no interest to us. Please try to stay on-topic in the future. Thanks for your cooperation, and have a blessed day.

Re:What is an "AIDS denialist"?

[Anonymous Coward]

lol you retard

Re:What is an "AIDS denialist"?

[Anonymous Coward]

And still none of knows what AIDS deniers believe according to you. Well done. What a great waste of three paragraphs of text.

Re:What is an "AIDS denialist"?

[Anonymous Coward]

Also, I looked up this so called Dr Duesberg and he believes exactly what the OP mentioned.
Namely that HIV is harmless, and AIDS is caused by chemicals and of course by "teh gay".
Right. I'm just going to assume those two other people you mentioned are crackpots as well.
So it seems to me that the OP perfectly described what these people believe.

Also who keeps modding this nutjob up? Have you people even looked into what these people believe?
If AIDS was caused by drugs only drug users would have AIDS. If AIDS was caused by gay only gays would have AIDS.
If HIV was harmless leaving it untreated wouldn't kill you.

Next your going to tell me there are people who don't believe in radiation and that all those people at Chernobyl died from bad humours.
These people should be punished the same way we punish holocaust deniers.
Oh wait I know, it must be conspiracy Tuesday.
I've got one: The Zionists planned the holocaust so they could get Britain to hand over Palestine to them.
Now I'll get modded up too right?

Re:What is an "AIDS denialist"?

[Microlith]

priests of scientism

Non-existent priests of something that doesn't exist.

once they feel confident in a conclusion it becomes like a religious dogma. Once they have a council and get all the archbishops to agree on this conclusion it is in their eyes forever true and beyond question.

Care to highlight some examples of this behavior?

Science is a method for ascertaining reality. One that presumes and requires the very skepticism that the priests fight as a mortal enemy.

I see you're tilting at windmills here, never mind.

Re:What is an "AIDS denialist"?

[SpankiMonki]

Drs Duesberg Rasnick and Farmer dont exist in your world, right? And certainly Dr Mullis (the inventor of the PCR test used in AIDS clinics worldwide) never existed, right?

Duesberg...that was the guy who had a role in all those AIDS deaths in South Africa, right? Isn't he also the guy who got pimp-slapped by multiple peer reviewers and investigated for scientific misconduct?

Rasnick...Rasnick...oh yeah, he was the dude who illegally set up clinical trials where he recruited poor black HIV+ individuals and instructed them to forgo antivirals in favor of "VitaCell cures AIDS" vitamin supplements.

Farmer? Never heard of him.

Mullis - the Nobel Prize winning chemist who dropped a boatload of acid in the 60s and claims he's encountered aliens and also believes in astrology.

Yep, nothing low rent about those guys.

Without any opinion at all on which side is right about the disease...

Riiight...

Re:What is an "AIDS denialist"?

[Arker]

If you think that is an accurate description of what Duesberg believes you havent even begun to understand his argument. Let me guess, you havent actually read HIM, just someone elses character assassination.

What Duesberg actually thinks is going on is that AIDS - the "symptoms" of the disease, primarily rapid immune collapse, but also possibly sarcomas and so on - is being caused by several different causes in different cases. In cases of chronic long term  intravenous drug users who develop AIDS, it would make a certain amount of sense to think their recreation and the collapse of their immune system might be related. Many early cases were, not just gay, but specifically gay men who were getting LOTS of sex, and engaging in the most risky forms of sex, and using amyl nitrate(?) on a daily basis on top of that. In that population group, a peculiar sarcoma is characteristic, but it's not seen in other groups with AIDS. Acquired sensitivity to environmental chemicals has been known for decades to cause severe immune problems, and could account for some of the cases as well. Finally, in some population groups, particularly in Africa, he argues that many AIDS deaths are really poverty deaths. In i.e. Ethiopia the mortality rate didnt skyrocket, but instead of people dying of i.e. dysentary they were now dying of AIDS, because it was redefined to include dysentary and other things that people were already dying of as diagnostic for AIDS.

Since HIV is only a symptom of the real problem, which varies, treating HIV is in his view worse than pointless. Worse because the "cocktails" used - many of which he trialed and rejected in his pioneering cancer research - are toxic and cause great damage in and of themselves. He believes that if you give them to a patient who has nothing worse than a flu, that patient will then develop AIDS, i.e. experience catastrophic immune collapse, with no virus needed. He suggests a range of treatments for different sorts of cases and continuing research focused on the immune system, rather than on the HIV virus, which he believes will turn out to have been a very costly red herring.

That, in a nutshell, is what he argues, without pejorative and at least without deliberately trying to make him sound like the retarded kid from the trailer park. It's from memory of a book that he wrote and I read some years back - not some idiots on the internet arguing about it, but actually reading what he wrote at least, but my apologies to him if I got anything wrong.

His hypothesis may well be wrong, but simply being wrong would not justify the negative reaction he has received. The man is of an age where I doubt he is actively working now, but back when this happened if you were making a short list of the people you really needed on your team if you were trying to find a cure for AIDS, he was a guy that would have been pretty close to the top of it. He voiced reservations and his career was pretty much killed right there. A lot of prestige and not just individuals but big institutions, government, media, research funding institutes, had just announced that HIV=AIDS and now that we knew what was causing it the cure was assured.

Oh, btw, where is that cure?

Re:What is an "AIDS denialist"?

[jklovanc]

Sure there are people who have other hypotheses but they have been refuted by research.
Duesberg claims have been refuted..
Rasnick's never actually researched AIDS and has made false claims of University affiliation.
Farmer wrote a book to refute the claim that AIDS came from Haiti.
Mullis has also done no actual research into HIV/AIDS. He is also a molecular biologist and infectious diseases is outside his area of expertise.

Without any opinion at all on which side is right about the disease,

Have you looked at the Durban Declaration?

The declaration has been signed by over 5,000 people, including Nobel prizewinners, directors of leading research institutions, scientific academies and medical societies, notably the US National Academy of Sciences, the US Institute of Medicine, Max Planck institutes, the European Molecular Biology Organization, the Pasteur Institute in Paris, the Royal Society of London, the AIDS Society of India and the National Institute of Virology in South Africa. In addition, thousands of individual scientists and doctors have signed, including many from the countries bearing the greatest burden of the epidemic. Signatories are of MD, PhD level or equivalent, although scientists working for commercial companies were asked not to sign

That seems to be a fairly strong and widespread opinion.

Re:What is an "AIDS denialist"?

[Anonymous Coward]

Thank god someone in this thread is still thinking.
It seems slashdot has been taken over by conspiracy nuts today.

Re:What is an "AIDS denialist"?

[NapalmV]

If you think this is harmless stupidity, think again. IIRC there is at least one case of an HIV positive mother who refused to test her child. The child later died in an illness with symptoms like those of someone who has AIDS. The mother also died, naturally.

And then they deny Darwinism....

Re:What is an "AIDS denialist"?

[Anonymous Coward]

You are a sad, strange little man, and you have my pity.

Re:What is an "AIDS denialist"?

[the gnat]

Worse because the "cocktails" used - many of which he trialed and rejected in his pioneering cancer research - are toxic and cause great damage in and of themselves.

This is ancient history. The modern anti-HIV cocktails are largely drugs that were invented long after Duesberg's research career fizzled out, and as far as I know were never considered for use against cancer. AZT was indeed very toxic, not unlike chemotherapy - but AZT isn't front-line treatment against AIDS and hasn't been for many years, at least not in the US.

His hypothesis may well be wrong, but simply being wrong would not justify the negative reaction he has received.

No, but being wrong and continuing to say the same thing over and over again for decades is a pretty good way to piss people off. And traveling to South Africa to meet with Mbeki and advocate against trying to cure the millions of South Africans with AIDS, well, that's just sick.

Oh, btw, where is that cure?

For people who can afford to pay for the treatment, AIDS basically is cured - we can't totally eliminate HIV from the system, but patients can survive almost indefinitely with a reasonable quality of life. Those therapies were developed by ignoring lunatics like Duesberg and targeting the molecular mechanisms of HIV. We don't have a cure for the flu either, despite knowing about it for much long than HIV, but that doesn't mean that mainstream science is wrong about the flu virus.

Re:What is an "AIDS denialist"?

[jklovanc]

Perhaps you should read things that take Duesberg head on. You will find that people have looked into his theories and found them wanting.

His hypothesis may well be wrong, but simply being wrong would not justify the negative reaction he has received.

That his hypothesis is wrong is not the issue. The fact that he still hold those hypotheses long after that have been scientifically prove wrong is the issue. It is quite possible that he does not want to admit he was wrong because that would mean he was instrumental in the deaths of 330,000 South Africans who died due to the government taking his advice.

A lot of prestige and not just individuals but big institutions, government, media, research funding institutes, had just announced that HIV=AIDS and now that we knew what was causing it the cure was assured.

I doubt anyone said a "cure was assured". That may have said it was a first step to a cure.

Oh, btw, where is that cure?

There are many diseases where the cause is well known and is still incurable. Viruses are are some of the most difficult. Remember, the common cold is yet to be cured.

Re:What is an "AIDS denialist"?

[the gnat]

On the other hand, the Perth group IIRC actually argues that there is no such thing as HIV at all. They challenge the claim that it's ever been properly isolated, and the best I recall they basically argue that what is being detected as HIV is simply cellular trash of a kind typical of an individual with severely compromised immunities.

This is another good example of being decades behind and/or batshit insane. HIV is one of the best-characterized viruses in history - the genome, structure, and pathology have all been extensively studied for 30 years, and while the human genome does have some elements that are probably leftover retroviral junk, there is nothing that would explain HIV away as an experimental artifact.

Re:What is an "AIDS denialist"?

[Arker]

"This is ancient history. The modern anti-HIV cocktails are largely drugs that were invented long after Duesberg's research career fizzled out"

Over the past decade or so I understand there has been a shift away from the ones he was writing about to less toxic drugs, and also a lot more emphasis on general immune and health support. Both of which he actually advocated early.

"No, but being wrong and continuing to say the same thing over and over again for decades is a pretty good way to piss people off."

Your chronology is wrong though, along with your cause and effect. He was only mildly skeptical and his career was trashed. Later, unable to get the funding for experimental work, he became a rather persistent and I am sure annoying critic, not before.

"For people who can afford to pay for the treatment, AIDS basically is cured - we can't totally eliminate HIV from the system, but patients can survive almost indefinitely with a reasonable quality of life."

In other words we havent found it yet.

We could keep people alive "almost indefinitely" back in the 80s.

"We don't have a cure for the flu either"

Huh?

Ok if you want to split that hair, fine.

We were told we would have a cure and/or a vaccine. Where's that vaccine?

Huge amounts of money have spent searching for it, quite a bit of time has passed, it doesnt seem to be any closer than it was back then, and we still hear the same thing about how HIV is so unique, it does things no other virus can, we still dont really understand it. Maybe it really is the special snowflake. Or maybe there is something fundamentally wrong about the assumptions we are working from.

All these years later, and assuming for the sake of argument that HIV does indeed cause AIDS and that Duesberg and the other skeptics were all dead wrong on that - treating them like scientists who are supposed to remain skeptical, rather than priests who are supposed to remain orthodox, would not have hurt and might well have helped.

I dont think there is anyone in the field today who would argue that we have just wasted too much time on understanding the workings of the immune system itself, or the role of environmental factors on its functioning. Plus the demands of human ego would have made it nearly unavoidable for them to concoct ways to test their hypothesis versus HIV=AIDS directly, experimentally.

It's one thing to cling to your theory when you are attacked for it, belittled for it, and made to suffer for it - like the wind blowing on the traveller you just make him clutch his coat tighter. But when your own test is built and run and it says no, it's obviously time to move on.

Re:What is an "AIDS denialist"?

[Arker]

"Mullis has also done no actual research into HIV/AIDS. He is also a molecular biologist and infectious diseases is outside his area of expertise."

This is hilarious and typical of the character assassination.

True, he's a molecular biologist. His expertise? He INVENTED the modern PCR test! Go look that up. It's actually a pretty big deal, there's a little something called the Nobel prize he got for that specifically.

Now he may not be a board certified specialist in infectious diseases but he is certainly qualified to comment on how the test he invented works, and that is exactly the context in which he chipped in to support Duesberg!

As I said earlier, dishonest debating tactics make me suspicious. If he were one of your 5,000 Durban signers, no one would question whether he was qualified.

Re:What is an "AIDS denialist"?

[interkin3tic]

Stupid isn't exactly the right word for all denialists. Kary Mullis, Nobel prize winner and inventor of PCR, is a denialist.

With any conspiracy theory, there's ample room for people to ask questions, and parts that don't on first look seem to support the explanation. The bigger the thing being explained, the more details people bring up that seem inconsistent. 9/11, Obama's citizenship, HIV, the moon landing... people spend enough time looking into something convinced that there's a conspiracy going on, eventually they find facts which make it sound convincing. They're motivated, often unconsciously, for attention.

Re:What is an "AIDS denialist"?

[Arker]

"Remember, the common cold is yet to be cured."

I am honestly not sure if you think you are putting one past me or if you think this makes sense.

There is no cure for the common cold because the "common cold" is actually a symptom with over 200 different possible causes, and it's a mild nuisance not worth the trouble. If one of them started killing people tomorrow I expect a vaccine at least, if not a full cure, would appear very quickly.

Re:What is an "AIDS denialist"?

[the gnat]

Over the past decade or so I understand there has been a shift away from the ones he was writing about to less toxic drugs

Longer than that; the search for HIV-specific drugs has been going on since the 1980s. The first antiretroviral came out the same year (1987) that Duesberg made his first complaint; new HIV therapies started to hit the market in the mid-1990s. The reason we didn't have anything sooner wasn't because doctors enjoy giving AZT to patients, it's because developing new drugs is not a famously speedy process.

We could keep people alive "almost indefinitely" back in the 80s.

No, the mortality rate for AIDS patients was quite high back in the 80s (and 90s, for that matter; I lost a teacher that way), and the quality of life much lower.

Huge amounts of money have spent searching for it, quite a bit of time has passed, it doesnt seem to be any closer than it was back then, and we still hear the same thing about how HIV is so unique, it does things no other virus can, we still dont really understand it. Maybe it really is the special snowflake. Or maybe there is something fundamentally wrong about the assumptions we are working from.

If that were the case, than there would have been plenty of other evidence pointing to it - in particular, the many therapies developed to stall (rather than prevent) HIV infection would have failed miserably, and many more people would have died. And it really is difficult to trick the immune system into fighting a virus that propagates by also tricking the immune system.

All these years later, and assuming for the sake of argument that HIV does indeed cause AIDS and that Duesberg and the other skeptics were all dead wrong on that - treating them like scientists who are supposed to remain skeptical, rather than priests who are supposed to remain orthodox, would not have hurt and might well have helped.

Why should we waste time on people who selectively ignore evidence (without presenting any of their own) and continue to make the same argument over and over again for years? Duesberg isn't reviled simply because he went against the prevailing scientific opinion - it's because after all those years, and all that counter-evidence, he refused to admit what any reasonable person would have recognized almost immediately. Scientists generally aren't known for their social skills, and we tend to be particularly intolerant of people who make extravagant (and contrarian) claims that most first-year grad students would be embarrassed to say out loud. This is just common sense - if you're going to publicly state that, in essence, "Professor So-and-so is full of shit", you'd better have really solid evidence our you're going to be ripped to shreds.

By the way, Duesberg hasn't only made an ass of himself over AIDS - his theories on cancer are just as controversial. What's really depressing is that he may be half right ("chromosomal abnormalities are a hallmark and possible cause of cancer"), but he's so spectacularly wrong on the other half ("mutations do not cause cancer") that he has trouble getting anyone to listen to him. And as with AIDS, people who would otherwise be dead today are still alive thanks to drugs that were developed based on the hypothesis that Duesberg claims is false.

Re:What is an "AIDS denialist"?

[Firethorn]

In other words we havent found it yet.

How are we doing on that war on cancer? How about the flu? Polio is still holding on in a few spots.

HIV is a retrovirus, it writes it into the cell's nucleas, even replicating as the cell replicates, until some event happens to cause the cell to start producing viral bodies again. It's basically a stealth virus.

It turns out that 'curing HIV' is bloody difficult. For that matter, just creating a vaccine for it is very difficult. Best study I remember thus far reduced the chance of infection by 50% - not enough to be viable, it needs to be above 90% to be considered an effective vaccine.

The mechanisions by which HIV causes AIDS(and not all cases of AIDS are caused by HIV) are at this point known, and it's part of the reason our drugs for it are as effective as they are, because we're targeting the virus directly.

Re:What is an "AIDS denialist"?

[Anonymous Coward]

Several.
HIV tests don't work.
HIV is not transmitted via heterosexual intercourse.
HIV doesn't cause AIDS, it's a harmless virus that only survives in immunocompromised hosts.
HIV doesn't exist.

Yeah, some of those are mutually exclusive, but hey... stick 5 minutes of fluff between them and nobody will notice.

Re:What is an "AIDS denialist"?

[tragedy]

It's not possible to find a single party line, but these are the most common beliefs AFAIK:

AIDS is caused by chemicals, big pharma, the government, the Bilderberg group, the Illuminati, space lizards, etc.

Having just watched the videos in question, one of the people interviewed in the videos they're debunking is Christina Maggiore. She is now dead and, at the time of shooting, her three year old daughter was already dead. Both are dead as a result of AIDs by competent medical accounts. She ran an organization: Alive and Well AIDs Alternatives, which was dedicated to convincing people not to test for AIDs or take antiretrovirals. In the case the death of her daughter (who was born from an AIDs infected mother not taking antiretrovirals and never given them, never tested and also not vaccinated for anything), she took her, for her pneumonia, to one of the board members of her organization, who prescribed her amoxicillin. When Christina herself was dying of pneumonia, she took various alternative medicines and apparently a "holistic cleanse". This is just background.

The weird bit is the causes of her daughter's death according to her and her denialist group and her own death according to the group. Their theory on the daughter's death, despite an autopsy confirming and AIDs related death, was an allergic reaction to Amoxicillin. Their theories on her death included a toxic alternative medication or "holistic cleanse". So... yeah. According to the AIDs-denialist nuts, the causes of death were probably the alternatives they sought out rather than going with proper medicine (not to knock amoxicillin, it might have actually been useful in conjunction with actual AIDS treatment).

Re:What is an "AIDS denialist"?

[tragedy]

There are some tests regarding allowing parents legal guardianship of their offspring. Generally speaking, if you let one die through total, idiotic negligence they take any others from you. Also, if you're too crazy to care for them and one dies due to that insanity, they take any others from you. Christina Maggiore breast-fed her daughter knowing that she (Christina) had been diagnosed as HIV-positive. She also didn't have her children vaccinated or tested for HIV or treated for HIV when seriously ill with the kind of symptoms you would expect from child onset AIDs. Despite being such a dangerous mother, she got to keep her other child who, hopefully, does not have AIDs.

Re:What is an "AIDS denialist"?

[jklovanc]

Your chronology is wrong though, along with your cause and effect. He was only mildly skeptical and his career was trashed.

He was not sceptical in many of his original statements. He was quite emphatic that HIV did not cause aids and there were many other causes. He argued well enough to cause South Africa to follow his ideas.

We were told we would have a cure and/or a vaccine.

You keep saying that yet I see no evidence of anyone actually uttering or writing those words. There were references to it eventually being cured but 20 years research into a retrovirus is still a pretty short time.

treating them like scientists who are supposed to remain skeptical, rather than priests who are supposed to remain orthodox, would not have hurt and might well have helped.

Tell that to the 330,000 South Africans who died because the Government took the advice of a few scientists over the advice of thousands of others. Duesberg was not harmless. A scientist remains skeptical until proven otherwise. The deniers remain obstinate in the face of overwhelming evidence. The largest piece of evidence being that anti-retrovirus treatments that attack the HIV retrovirus have prolonged the lived of AIDS patients. If there is no HIV/AIDS link the treatment would not work.

Re:What is an "AIDS denialist"?

[Anonymous Coward]

If one of them started killing people tomorrow I expect a vaccine at least, if not a full cure, would appear very quickly.

Gee, we should expect a cure "very quickly" then since people do occasionally die from nearly any of the various viruses that cause the common cold.

Re:What is an "AIDS denialist"?

[Anonymous Coward]

His expertise? He INVENTED the modern PCR test! Go look that up. It's actually a pretty big deal, there's a little something called the Nobel prize he got for that specifically. ... As I said earlier, dishonest debating tactics make me suspicious.

If you believe that latter, you shouldn't have brought up the former. There are quite a few Nobel prize winners that went on to promote demonstratively wrong ideas, and to express opinions in fields they have less background in then the work they actually did related to the prize. Regardless of how important the PCR method is, that is a separate story, and scientists are capable of being involved in great successes at the same time as great failures. At least when it happens to physicists that won the Noble prize or similar high acclaims, they're new proposals have a bit more definitive experimental disproof.

Re:What is an "AIDS denialist"?

[Darinbob]

The most common view I've heard about is denying that HIV and AIDS are related to each other, without any stated conspiracy theory attached other than that scientists were wrong and jumping to conclusions.

Re:What is an "AIDS denialist"?

[tragedy]

First, PCR isn't a test, it's a technique for generating copies of DNA. It's used to amplify a sample of DNA for various reasons. One of those reasons may be to amplify a sample to make it easier to detect HIV RNA or transcripted DNA. As far as I know, it's not typically used in AIDs clinics. The expertise and equipment required is usually found in more sophisticated labs. Most clinics are going to be using simpler tests and sending out blood or referring patients if they need more sophisticated testing.

Dr Mullis is, indeed, widely credited with PCR, although his technique was just a refinement of a much earlier technique. It should be noted that he's quite public about his avid enjoyment of LSD along with his views that anthrogenic climate change isn't real, HIV doesn't cause AIDS, oh, and that the date of your birth can be used in conjunction with the current apparent position of the stars and planets to divine your personality and fate. Aside from making his own LSD, he's apparently invented plenty of his own psychoactive drugs and used himself as a human guinea pig. Now, I know it's usually an invalid assumption to criticize a person's science based on their personal life, but when their personal life involves heavy use of drugs that are known to have permanent mind altering effects, not to mention drugs with completely unknown effects, it might be wise to take extraordinary claims they make with a grain of salt. Especially when they've done no research in the actual field and are just expressing an opinion.

Dr. Duesburg did some interesting work on cancer. Apparently along with disputing that HIV causes AIDS, he also disputes the results of his own work. His most recent work on cancer is neither proven nor disproven. His views on AIDS is that it's a result of drug abuse and he appears to use no true Scotsman logic for every case where anyone who is clearly not a drug abuser (such as three year old girls) has AIDS. Duesburg played no small part in the policy decision by South Africa to withhold AIDS medications in South Africa. The death toll from that policy is approximately 330,000.

Rasnick performed unauthorized experiments in South Africa where he convinced AIDS patients not to take their antiretrovirals and to take vitamins instead. This was working with a business that, surprise, surprise, sells vitamin supplements. At least five died as a result. He's also been shown to have lied or misrepresented his affiliation with UC Berkley.

As for Dr Farmer... I'm not sure what Dr. Farmer you're talking about? Is it Paul Farmer? As far as I can tell, he has no Denialist views with regards to HIV, but does have views that the current drugs aren't enough and that more needs to be done in areas of the world where AIDS is pandemic socially, medically, politically, etc. You might have meant a different Dr. Farmer, however.

The ones from that list who are actual AIDS denialists seem to be in the minority. There are also plenty of scientists who had done a lot of research that these characters don't even bother to address who have come up with different conclusions. There's also plenty of emperical research that shows that HIV causes AIDS. Not to mention all the laboratory research done with non-human primates that shows that infection with the SIV retrovirus produces AIDS-like symptoms and kills the primates. Dr Duesberg insists that all retroviruses, not just HIV and related viruses, _can't_ kill and are completely harmless. The only way he could believe this without doing his own experiments is by covering his ears, closing his eyes and shouting "La, la, la, I can't hear you!"

Re:What is an "AIDS denialist"?

[tragedy]

There are several different alternative hypotheses, for instance Duesberg argues that HIV is harmless, a very weak virus that is found only in the blood of people experiencing immune collapse (for some other reason) because a healthy immune system wipes it out immediately. Just an opportunistic infection that can be used as a diagnostic.

On the other hand, the Perth group IIRC actually argues that there is no such thing as HIV at all. They challenge the claim that it's ever been properly isolated, and the best I recall they basically argue that what is being detected as HIV is simply cellular trash of a kind typical of an individual with severely compromised immunities.

So you believe which of those two contrary hypothoses? They can't both be right. Do you just add them together and say: "Well, they both think that the mainstream science that actually has a good handle on all of this must be wrong so, if both agree on that, then they must be right, even though their basic theories disagree in other respects"? Seriously? "Denialist" may be a slur word, but if it also accurately describes reasoning like that, it would seem to be justified.

Re:What is an "AIDS denialist"?

[Anonymous Coward]

'At least when it happens to physicists that won the Noble prize or similar high acclaims, they're new proposals have a bit more definitive experimental disproof.'
Also a 'Higgs Denier' or similar doesn't tend to cause deaths and certainly not on the scale of the AIDs deniers (unless a lot of physicists get it wrong anyway). When physicists kill a lot of people they at least mean too (eg Manhattan project).

Re:What is an "AIDS denialist"?

[fsck-beta]

Colossal lunatic detected.

Re:What is an "AIDS denialist"?

[Anonymous Coward]

For people who can afford to pay for the treatment, AIDS basically is cured - we can't totally eliminate HIV from the system, but patients can survive almost indefinitely with a reasonable quality of life.

I thought that was called "remission", not "cure".

Re:What is an "AIDS denialist"?

[sageres]

Her child, Eliza Jane Scovill died from AIDS-related complications on May 16, 2005. Christina Maggiore died from AIDS-related complications on December 27, 2008. I am wondering, if the idea is dangerous, and the propagandists of that idea literally cause death, can we shut them up for public safety sake? Or sue them into oblivion and charge them with endangering the public?

Re:What is an "AIDS denialist"?

[Anonymous Coward]

You're being a bit simplistic here. If you're trying to quote wikipedia, the article actually says there are 200 viruses, not "different possible causes". In fact, it points out reason the common cold is hard to generate a vaccine for is because the viruses mutate rapidly. To quote: "Vaccination has proved difficult as there are so many viruses involved and they mutate rapidly. Creation of a broadly effective vaccine is thus highly improbable."

Guess what else mutates rapidly? Here, I'll just quote the wikipedia article for you:
"HIV differs from many viruses in that it has very high genetic variability. This diversity is a result of its fast replication cycle, with the generation of about 10^10 virions every day, coupled with a high mutation rate of approximately 3 x 10^-5 per nucleotide base per cycle of replication and recombinogenic properties of reverse transcriptase. This complex scenario leads to the generation of many variants of HIV in a single infected patient in the course of one day."

It's REALLY hard to generate a vaccine for viruses like these.

Re:What is an "AIDS denialist"?

[Arker]

"So you believe which of those two contrary hypothoses?"  [sic]

Neither, of course.

A scientific mind does not function on 'belief.'

If you want me to guess? I'd say both of the groups I mentioned, as well as the orthodox establishment, will probably turn out to have been substantially wrong to one degree or another. But that is no more than an educated guess based on the history of science.

Whether or not there is ultimately any truth to the criticisms and countercriticisms is really secondary to me. What interests me the most is the way that supposedly scientific institutions devolve into exactly the same sort of relationships and behavior that we expect from religious institutions - the way that what should be a scientific theory comes to be viewed more like a religious creed, and scientific skepticism comes to be seen as heresy. It's not a matter of the orthodoxy is right or the heresy is right - they may both be wrong, at least partly. But what the heck does orthodoxy and heresy have to do with science?

Nothing.

Re:What is an "AIDS denialist"?

[Arker]

Yes, technically PCR is a technique to amplify the signal to allow detection via a test that would otherwise not be sensitive enough. If Mullins believes that it can also amplify noise to create a false signal, that opinion would certainly be well within his professional competence, as well as a statement against his own interest, no?

"Now, I know it's usually an invalid assumption to criticize a person's science based on their personal life"

If you know that then why did you bother wasting an entire paragraph doing just that? I dont care what these people do in their free time, what I care about is the integrity of science.

"Dr. Duesburg did some interesting work on cancer. Apparently along with disputing that HIV causes AIDS, he also disputes the results of his own work"

You say that like it's a bad thing, when in reality it is a mark of a real scientist to remain skeptical even of ones own work.

Really, it's almost like you WANT me to believe you are arguing in bad faith.

Re:What is an "AIDS denialist"?

[david_thornley]

It was not possible to keep AIDS sufferers alive almost indefinitely in the 1980s. Once they started to show symptoms, they tended not to live another three years. Modern treatment isn't an actual cure, but it's the next best thing.

Re:What is an "AIDS denialist"?

[jklovanc]

Molecular biologist is not a virologist or epidemiologist. Yes he invented PCR which by the way is not a test. It is a way of replicating DNA so that small quantities can be tested. It had nothing to do with disease transmission.

he is certainly qualified to comment on how the test he invented works

Here is the introduction from one of Duesberg's books. The only link to PCR is that he was doing work with PCR when he started asking questions. His issue is that he could not find someone who could point to a smoking gun at that time and became a Duesberg believer after one lecture. Take a look at this page and you see many smoking guns that show HIV needs to be present for AIDS yet neither Duesberg or Mullis have changed their views. In 1988 there may have been lack of proof but today there is plenty of proof.

Re:What is an "AIDS denialist"?

[jklovanc]

because the "common cold" is actually a symptom with over 200 different possible causes

Care to cite anything that supports this claim? There are a number of causes but the main one is the Rhinovirus. Why is there no cure for the rhinovirus? The fact it mutates quickly make curing it very difficult. The same goes for HIV with mutates even faster than the rhinovirus.

Your position that "it they were right they would have cured it by now" is baseless speculation considering how difficult it is to cure viruses in general and genetically diverse viruses in particular.

You now add to the mix "one of them started killing people tomorrow I expect a vaccine at least". That too is false as death is not the only driving factor behind research. Rhinovirus is an extremely widespread disease infecting millions of people a year causing the loss of billions of dollars in productivity. The cure for the common cold would make the inventor a billionaire. This much potential for profit should induce lots of research.

Re:What is an "AIDS denialist"?

[tragedy]

"So you believe which of those two contrary hypothoses?" [sic]

Neither, of course.

A scientific mind does not function on 'belief.'

Oh please, spare me the pointless semantic games. 'belief' and 'religious belief' are not the same thing. All minds function on belief, scientific or not. The scientific mind just does its best to have rational beliefs based on emperical evidence where possible. When I talk about believing one theory over another, critical assesment is implicit in my understanding of the term belief. You can pretend that the two theories you mention are somehow valid alternatives to the prevailing theory. Way back in the 80s, you would have had an argument. You could lay out a whole list of experments and observations required before picking one over the other. The simple fact is, since then, those experiments have been done. The evidence says that HIV exists. It's been observed through a number of different imaging methods again and again and again. Its been watched infecting cells, then budding off from those cells in waves of virus particles.The probability of all these observations being wrong is fantastically low. This puts the "Perth Group" you mentioned firmly into "requires extraordinary proof" category.

Duesberg is only marginally better. His theories about the harmlessness of HIV, and retroviruses in general, appear ridiculous in light of all of the animal experiments and observations of human infection over the decades.

Whether or not there is ultimately any truth to the criticisms and countercriticisms is really secondary to me.

Yikes. Why are you even bothering to discuss this then?

What interests me the most is the way that supposedly scientific institutions devolve into exactly the same sort of relationships and behavior that we expect from religious institutions - the way that what should be a scientific theory comes to be viewed more like a religious creed, and scientific skepticism comes to be seen as heresy.

Except that's really, really not what's going on here. The denialists typically either just plain don't have an alternate theory or have a lack of any real evidence for their theory. Scientists don't look at this and say: "These people are heretics and we must shun them!". They look and say: "These people either have little or no experimental evidence or they do have experimental evidence and it completely fails to support their conclusion. Whereas the mainstream theory has lots of expermental evidence that backs it up and makes testable predictions which are successfully saving people's lives." Admittedly many scientists do say "We should shun Duesberg", but that's a natural human reaction to someone who seems to have been instrumental in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people, many of them children.

Re:What is an "AIDS denialist"?

[tragedy]

Yes, technically PCR is a technique to amplify the signal to allow detection via a test that would otherwise not be sensitive enough. If Mullins believes that it can also amplify noise to create a false signal, that opinion would certainly be well within his professional competence, as well as a statement against his own interest, no?

PCR doesn't create DNA that isn't already there. It takes what's there and makes more of it. It won't make viral DNA magically appear if it's not there in the first place.

"Now, I know it's usually an invalid assumption to criticize a person's science based on their personal life"

If you know that then why did you bother wasting an entire paragraph doing just that? I dont care what these people do in their free time, what I care about is the integrity of science.

I answered that question in the very same (admittedly run-on) sentence you quoted. Your apparent confusion sems disingenuous. Basically I said that one exception to the rule is when their personal life involves doing things that can literally drive you insane. If someone is actually insane, that might be a valid reason to take their wild hypotheses with a grain of salt. If they actually present good experimental data then it doesn't matter if, in their spare time, they're drilling holes in their head to let the gods in. When they have no good experimental data and are basically just making sophist proclamations, then it does matter if they're insane.

As for the integrity of science, you have a strange way of showing your concern for it.

"Dr. Duesburg did some interesting work on cancer. Apparently along with disputing that HIV causes AIDS, he also disputes the results of his own work"

You say that like it's a bad thing, when in reality it is a mark of a real scientist to remain skeptical even of ones own work.

_You_ were the one making an argument from authority using these people. It's not unreasonable for me, in light of that, to discuss their actual scientific track record.

Really, it's almost like you WANT me to believe you are arguing in bad faith.

That's just pathetic. You're the one who, just a few paragraphs back, quoted a sentence fragment out of context in order to attack a straw man. After that little piece of rhetorical garbage, you have some nerve.

Re:What is an "AIDS denialist"?

[tragedy]

Some of them might be practicing medicine without a license. Beyond that, it would not be a good thing to make a habit of stifling free speech in that way. Those in direct care of minors such as parents and doctors, however, should face some sort of sanction. Maggiore supposedly got off because she was considered non-negligent because she consulted multiple physicians. The thing is, the reason she consulted multiple physicians was to find one who would echo what she wanted to hear.

Re:What is an "AIDS denialist"?

[Arker]

"If you believe that latter, you shouldn't have brought up the former. There are quite a few Nobel prize winners that went on to promote demonstratively wrong ideas"

You premise does not support your conclusion, your unstated (and incorrect) missing postulate being that I somehow implied that having a Nobel prize made one infallible. Nothing could be further from the truth, of course. Need I mention Obamas "Peace Prize?"

But outside of the Peace prize, a Nobel is at least a fairly good indicator of greater than normal skill in the field in which it was won. And again, in this case, it was won for work on the same test he commented on. That doesnt make him infallible but it certainly rebuts the accusation that he was outside of expertise, commenting on something he knew nothing about. There just is no question that he was at the time this happened one of the worlds leading authorities on that test, he was comfortably inside his competence.

It's amazing that anyone could be so dense as to need this spelled out for them in such detail. I don't say that to try to be offensive but out of genuine amazement. He invented the test. He said to paraphrase that yes it could indeed do exactly what Duesberg thought it was doing. Whether or not they were both largely wrong is at this point many many years later entirely besides the point. The question is was their skepticism at the time reasonable and if you have any understanding of what science means I dont see how you can think it wasnt. Science is the product of skepticism, it requires it, it becomes disfunctional when it doesnt get enough, and it cannot be done by men who are afraid to be wrong.

Re:What is an "AIDS denialist"?

[Arker]

"Oh please, spare me the pointless semantic games. 'belief' and 'religious belief' are not the same thing. All minds function on belief, scientific or not."

It's no game, and a scientific mind nonetheless is by definition one disciplined and trained to disallow it. It's not that hard if you understand the need and apply yourself. The closest you should come to "beliefs" about scientific questions would be the assumption that sensory data does reflect some sort of existential reality rather than being some sort of elaborate hallucination. Even that is open to question, and in fact questioning it regularly is a good exercise. This has nothing to do with the Matrix btw this was probably an old technique when the skeptics of ancient Greece started teaching it.

There are no beliefs. There are only working hypotheses, confidence estimates; empirical evidence and logic.

"Admittedly many scientists do say "We should shun Duesberg", but that's a natural human reaction to someone who seems to have been instrumental in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people, many of them children."

The same rhetorical dodge just keeps getting used over and over again.

We are not and have never been talking about Duesberg later in Africa. We are talking about Duesberg right after the media all lit up with the big official announcement that "HIV=AIDS."  He wasnt blacklisted and shunned and treated like a subhuman for what happened in SA years later, he was destroyed right then and his life followed a very different trajectory from that point on as a result of that.

Re:What is an "AIDS denialist"?

[tragedy]

The closest you should come to "beliefs" about scientific questions would be the assumption that sensory data does reflect some sort of existential reality rather than being some sort of elaborate hallucination.

Which is pretty much what I was saying when I said: "All minds function on belief, scientific or not. The scientific mind just does its best to have rational beliefs based on emperical evidence where possible. When I talk about believing one theory over another, critical assesment is implicit in my understanding of the term belief." When you go to sleep in your bed and wake up in your bed, you believe you spent the night sleeping in your bed without other evidence to the contrary. For most people (who aren't known somnambulists and who don't live with hyperactive practical jokers) it's the best hypothesis. Going by the connotation of the term "belief" I use, you "believe" in the overwhelmingly likely hypothesis unless or until something better comes along. You believe that you spent all night in your bed asleep, until you see the video your friends made where they kept you asleep using ether and carried you around town, posing you in inappropriate positions in public places. After that, you should generally believe something different about how you spent your night.

All minds function on belief. Belief that your senses or memory aren't failing you or, sometimes, belief that your senses or memory _are_ failing you. You do the best you can with what you have and re-assess when you believe you have new information. The scientific mind tends to shy away from religious beliefs, irrational beliefs, inflexible beliefs, etc. but it still has beliefs.

You clearly mean something different by "belief". Good for you, but that makes this just a semantic argument. It's like the stupid argument about the word "luck". Some people are "lucky", meaning that they have enjoyed beneficial random circumstances. That doesn't mean that there's a mystical force granting those beneficial circumstances and it doesn't predict the future random circumstances those people may encounter. That doesn't stop some people from arguing that I'm talking about a mystical force when I use the term "luck".

The same rhetorical dodge just keeps getting used over and over again.

We are not and have never been talking about Duesberg later in Africa. We are talking about Duesberg right after the media all lit up with the big official announcement that "HIV=AIDS." He wasnt blacklisted and shunned and treated like a subhuman for what happened in SA years later, he was destroyed right then and his life followed a very different trajectory from that point on as a result of that.

No we're not. Note that I said "we". It's possible that you are, but you neglected to mention that in any of your posts in this thread. Rather you said:

There are several different alternative hypotheses, for instance Duesberg argues that HIV is harmless, a very weak virus that is found only in the blood of people experiencing immune collapse (for some other reason) because a healthy immune system wipes it out immediately

What tense is that written in? Past or present? Ditto to:

..the Perth group IIRC actually argues that there is no such thing as HIV at all.

You're reminding me of the old anecdote about the rifleman who shoots the side of a barn and then paints a target around the bullethole. Except, there's already a target, but you're saying that the really target was actually the spot over to the left and up a bit where your bullet happened to hit.

I'm not aware of anyone treating Duesberg like a subhuman before his self-promotion really started getting fatal results. I am aware of the fact that, although Duesberg is, in fact, a scientist, he isn't really one in the context of AIDS research. The reason being that he isn't actually doing any research. True, analysis of the results

"denialist"

[oldhack]

Someone calls other(s) "denialist", I see a demagogue asswipe.

And/or a click troll.

Re:"denialist"

[Anonymous Coward]

They are denialist. They deny western medicines view on AIDs. They are idiots just like you.

Re:"denialist"

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm looking for a dentist, can you advise? Thank you, sir.

Re:"denialist"

[0123456]

"Denialist" is the new "Racist"; a meaningless term intended to shut down debate.

Re:"denialist"

[hey!]

I recommend the Wikipedia article on Denialism, which starts with a definition:

In human behavior, denialism is exhibited by individuals choosing to deny reality as a way to avoid dealing with an uncomfortable truth.

Racism has three definitions listed in the Wiktionary entry:

1. The belief that each race has distinct and intrinsic attributes.
2. The belief that one race is superior to all others.
3. Prejudice or discrimination based upon race.

Of course beliefs referenced are predicated on the folk concept of race, which doesn't hold up to biological scrutiny.

Re:"denialist"

[Anonymous Coward]

do you also deny the existence of different breeds of dogs, or that some breeds are smarter on average...

Re:"denialist"

[hey!]

I certainly do not deny the existence of different breeds of dogs, but these are by no means analogous to the folk scientific concept of human "race".

There are three factors which account for the distinctiveness of dog breeds:

(1) Dogs are domesticated animals and thus less genetically diverse than humans, who are wild animals.

(2) The dog genome produces anomalously high variation in phenotype with slight differences in genotype, in comparison to other mammals.

(3) Dogs reach sexual maturity as early as six months old.

These factors make dogs ideal for developing distinct types that breed true. None of these things are true of humans. Humans do not breed true in the way dogs do; siblings resemble each other much less than dog litter mates.

Re:"denialist"

[jklovanc]

In human behavior, denialism is exhibited by individuals choosing to deny reality as a way to avoid dealing with an uncomfortable truth.

In this case the "uncomfortable truth" being that their advice lead to the deaths of over 330,00 South Africans due to misguided health policy.

Re:"denialist"

[tragedy]

"Racist" is not a meaningless term. Yes, it is sometimes misapplied, but calling it meaningless in light of the whole of human history and the present day is a monumental mis-statement (to be kind about it).

Re:Fuck Beta

[Anonymous Coward]

this is old news too

Hmm...

[Anonymous Coward]

Ok, so there's supposedly no significant recourse if somebody lies when making a false DMCA claim, or at least that's what everyone always says in such cases.

Wouldn't false claims be covered by laws pertaining to, say, fraud? Or, given that it's a document that accuses the target of a crime, libel?

Re:Hmm...

[Anonymous Coward]

For something like this... no, not really.
To get anywhere, you'd have to prove intent... i.e. the claimant *knew* their claims were bogus from the start.
Considering the DMCAed videos do actually contain clips from the film... good luck with that.

Re:Hmm...

[Luckyo]

Good luck trying that one. Especially over youtube takedown.

Re:Hmm...

[tragedy]

I've watched the videos. The problem is that they have lots of reasons to think that they can push a claim through some courts. That's not to say that they have a valid claim, but he modern yardstick is whether they can get some judge to buy it, not whether they're actually in the right. The video content of the first two videos is almost entirely footage from the video they're debunking. A lot of it is the same clips repeated multiple times and there's plenty of extra content in the form of a voice-over critiquing the whole thing, but the majority of the actual video and a decent amount of the audio comes from the other work. This is meant to be protected as the entire work is obviously a valid critical piece, rather than any sort of copy or attempt to plagiarize the original. The problem is, they still might be able to make an argument based on percentages and get a court to buy it. It would be a travesty of justice, but how often do travesties of justice _not_ happen in courts?

Wow. Just wow.

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, it IS a term like racist, but both are valid and useful terms. Racists are people who are too mindblowingly ignorant to deserve to live in society. Denialists, likewise, are those who deny what's right in front of their fucking faces, and again, are too mindblowingly ignorant to deserve to live in society.

Yes, they ARE terms used to shut down debate, because there is no point debating with people too stupid to process fucking obvious things that are right in front of their faces. If on one end of a debate there is a racist or denialist, there's simply no debate to be had.

Re:Fuck Beta

[buswolley]

soylentnews? Tell me more.

Re:Wow. Just wow.

[Anonymous Coward]

We just need to get it over with and burn them all.

backwards

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, this is true, but it's deeper than that. Bad science, denialism and similar match evidence to a pre-existing truth assertion or hypothesis. The original hypothesis is initially presumed to be true - it is the gold standard starting place for these people. Evidence which supports this pre-established truth is therefore true, and evidence which refutes it is false. It's the exact opposite of real science.

Re:backwards

[Opportunist]

Sounds like they're building some kind of religion.

Unconstitutional

[the eric conspiracy]

This is clearly an unconstitutional restraint of journalism.

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press.

Come on man.

Re:Unconstitutional

[jklovanc]

The Supreme Court of the USA has ruled many times that the right freedom of speech stops where it harms others. Copyright and the laws that support it are there to stop economic harm.

Re:Unconstitutional

[Anonymous Coward]

Given the shorter original copyright term could an argument be made that the extension to copyright makes any harm after the original term artificial harm generated by a law that another law is then trying to use to curtail free speech. If this where acceptable all you'd have to do is make a law that gave an advantage that was somehow harmed by free speech to effectively curtail free speech, which (IANAL or USAian) doesn't seem to be within the intent of the constitutional amendment of free speech. Of course the problem is who gets to rule on it and getting it before them in the first place.

Re:Unconstitutional

[gIobaljustin]

The Supreme Court of the USA has ruled many times that the right freedom of speech stops where it harms others.

The first amendment says no such thing. As usual, the Supreme Court likes to make shit up, rather than just interpret the constitution; they did the same thing with the miller test.

Copyright and the laws that support it are there to stop economic harm.

You cannot be harmed if you 'lose' something you never had and was never yours. Potential profit is not yours and not something you can ever have, so there is no harm.

If you say that certain people deserve government-enforced monopolies over ideas that infringe upon free speech and private property rights, I say that you don't care about freedom. If someone can't figure out how to make money, they don't deserve to have government thugs create a monopoly for them. Let the free market sort this little 'problem' out.

Re:Unconstitutional

[jklovanc]

I think we have had this conversation in another thread. You believe that there should be no limit on free speech. I believe reasonable limits are good. Neither of us will change our positions therefore there is no reason to continue this thread.

Re:Unconstitutional

[causality]

I think we have had this conversation in another thread. You believe that there should be no limit on free speech. I believe reasonable limits are good. Neither of us will change our positions therefore there is no reason to continue this thread.

I have just one question. I'm not sure I'd ever agree with your position but I would like to better understand it. I remain open-minded about its potential merits.

Why do you believe that a reasonable legal (i.e. case law) limit is better than any other method of providing an effective limitation?

For example, if the average person learned not to ever believe anything important without first investigating it, then false statements stemming from unlimited free speech would be effectively limited. Such statements would exist but they wouldn't have any power. As a bonus this mentality would be much more resistant to the various marketing and propaganda techniques.

What makes you sure that legal limits would be better than another solution that we've never seriously tried?

Re:Unconstitutional

[jklovanc]

For example, if the average person learned not to ever believe anything important without first investigating it

Mainly because the average person does not have the time or resources to check out everything important. Especially when time sensitive things occur. Should doctors be able to advertise untested and unproven treatments? The average person has no way to verify them. What happens if a couple of days before an election it comes out that a candidate is a pedophile. Do you ignore the statement because you do not have time to look into it before voting? How would you even look into that allegation? If on the other hand one knew there were libel laws it is much more reasonable to believe it. I am a research fanatic and I would be overwhelmed if I had to check every important statement.

The conversation I was having with the other poster was that he see copying and disseminating other people's work as free speech. I see it as theft. His come back was that free speech overrides any monetary loss. I don't agree.

What makes you sure that legal limits would be better than another solution that we've never seriously tried?

Mainly because the only alternative anyone has presented is "anyone can say anything they want at any time no matter what harm it causes". Sorry but society does not work that way. The main problem is that people are emotional being and not always logical. The right speaker saying the right words can cause some very bad things to happen. With libel and slander laws there is at least a consequence for the damage they do.

Psst - hey kid...

[Overzeetop]

...this has nothing to do with the government. Nobody here is "the government" - it's just three private parties arguing over who's shit got posted to youtube.

Re:Psst - hey kid...

[the eric conspiracy]

The reason it matters is the DMCA. That's clearly the government interfering with free speech and journalism.

As the Founders said, Congress can't make a law that does that.

Re:Psst - hey kid...

[tragedy]

...this has nothing to do with the government. Nobody here is "the government" - it's just three private parties arguing over who's shit got posted to youtube.

Unless we're talking about the government that passed the DMCA into law, or that established copyright in the first place, or that runs the courts where this would go if they file a DMCA counter-claim. You could have made a valid point that copyright is also established in the constitution, however.

Re:Psst - hey kid...

[swillden]

Bah.

The DMCA's counter-notice provisions clearly preserve free speech and journalism. All Myles has to do is file a counter notice and YouTube will put his video back up, available for all to see. Then he and the copyright owner can go to court and fight about it, and if the court determines that this really is a freedom of speech / journalism question, then the Fair Use provisions of copyright law will allow it to stay up. For that matter, if the Fair Use provisions didn't exist in the law, the courts would impose them. Indeed, the Fair Use provisions codified in Federal law were originally created by Judge Joseph Story's ruling in Folsom v Marsh, an 1841 case about infringing copies of 533 pages of George Washington's biography.

There are lots of things wrong with copyright law -- duration and scope, mostly -- but with respect to all of the issues here Congress (with help from the courts) has done a very good job of balancing First Amendment issues against Copyright Clause issues. The only rational way to disagree with this is to assert that the First Amendment overrides and invalidates the Copyright Clause, and I challenge you to find a single shred of evidence that that was the intent of the authors and ratifiers of the Bill of Rights.

Re:Psst - hey kid...

[gIobaljustin]

The DMCA's counter-notice provisions clearly preserve free speech and journalism.

Wrong. The DMCA's disgusting notices give us a "guilty unless proven innocent" system. They should be forced to go to court before anyone can be legally obliged to remove anything, at the very least.

The only rational way to disagree with this is to assert that the First Amendment overrides and invalidates the Copyright Clause, and I challenge you to find a single shred of evidence that that was the intent of the authors and ratifiers of the Bill of Rights.

Intent is irrelevant. The constitution is what it is, and free speech trumps copyright. An amendment amends and changes the constitution, and the first comes after the copyright clause.

Copyright, to begin with, is an absolutely disgusting concept that infringes upon free speech and private property rights. There is also not any proof it's actually beneficial beyond completely baseless speculation, but that point is less important, as even if it weren't true, freedom is more important than safety.

Re:Psst - hey kid...

[david_thornley]

Actually, nobody can be legally obliged to remove anything without a court case. The issue here is safe harbor. By following certain rules, YouTube avoids potential legal liability. The other question you should ask is under what circumstances can YouTube be legally obliged to publish the video.

Re:Psst - hey kid...

[gIobaljustin]

Actually, nobody can be legally obliged to remove anything without a court case. The issue here is safe harbor.

That basically amounts to the same thing. The DMCA is a bad law for having these strikes to begin with. Safe harbor should be given to websites with impunity.

Re:Psst - hey kid...

[david_thornley]

If copyright is to mean anything (and I realize that's debatable around here, but I don't want to get into that debate right now), there has to be some mechanism for enforcement. The copyright holder has to be able to stop infringement by legal means.

So, if somebody puts some copyrighted stuff on a web site without permission, what's the copyright holder to do? You're suggesting that the website should be immune from legal action, presumably if some random person put it up there. Would the copyright holder's only recourse be to track down that random person to send a cease-and-desist letter to? I'm really drawing a blank here on what should happen.

With the DMCA, the copyright holder files an infringement claim, and the website can cover itself by taking down the stuff. The website operators can pass the claim on to the person who put it up, if they can find that person, and that person can file a counterclaim, but has to list contact information. With claim and counterclaim, the website has stepped out of the way, and any legal action proceeds between copyright holder and person filing the counterclaim. This appears reasonable to me.

Certainly the DMCA is abusable and abused, but I don't see a better general approach, assuming copyright is to mean anything. We do not want the website held liable for copyright infringements, since that would destroy all sites that depend on user-posted content. We do not want to require the website to verify identity and address of any poster, since that would be a really big job if the poster didn't want to be caught. If we allow random people to post copyrighted material to websites without any repercussion, that really, really weakens copyright.

Re:Psst - hey kid...

[gIobaljustin]

If copyright is to mean anything (and I realize that's debatable around here, but I don't want to get into that debate right now), there has to be some mechanism for enforcement. The copyright holder has to be able to stop infringement by legal means.

Go to court and get the court to issue a court order that will make the website remove it. If the user posted the content, the website wouldn't be held responsible (safe harbor). No more DMCA requests that remove safe harbor. Difficult and expensive? Yes, but it also removes the ability for copyright trolls to be able to remove content without courts or judges being involved at all under the threat of removing a website's safe harbor. Justice is more important than copyright.

The problem with your thinking is that you (seem to) assume the ability to be able to to cheaply and easily censor content is a good thing; it isn't.

Re:Psst - hey kid...

[david_thornley]

No, it's because I'm assuming we want to keep copyright more or less working. That requires some "censorship", as you call it, to control the distribution of copyrighted material. Court orders are not cheap, while it is cheap to put up something copyrighted.

I'm puzzled by "DMCA requests that remove safe harbor". The DMCA has provisions for compromises that leave things like YouTube able to operate without totally ignoring copyright, and AFAICT those are the only provisions I like.

Re:Psst - hey kid...

[gIobaljustin]

No, it's because I'm assuming we want to keep copyright more or less working.

It isn't working now.

Court orders are not cheap, while it is cheap to put up something copyrighted.

Real justice isn't cheap; that doesn't mean we should discard it so we can catch more Bad People. I much prefer freedom over safety.

not generally a problem

[Anonymous Coward]

Although what you describe DOES happen, there are only a few cases where it is a problem. The vast, vast majority of "scientific dogma" type beliefs really do have no valid counter-evidence whatsoever. Pretending there is pretty much always ends up being a waste of time. This includes things like man-made climate change or evolution where 100% of the real science is on the same side of the debate.

If a scientific theory is questioned with good reason, it will generally get a second look. No, it's not always the case, but people, even scientists can be slow to accept things. There is a talk on TED-X from a guy addressing exactly that - questioning the stability of certain physical constants. It was banned from TED, and I think it was one of the best talks I've seen about the problem of scientific dogma which you speak of.

Re:Wow. Just wow.

[Anonymous Coward]

The jews?

Re:Wow. Just wow.

[Anonymous Coward]

No, the niggers.
Remember, it's the new "Racist", not the new "Antisemitist".

Do AIDS denialists disbelief other STD'S?

[Anonymous Coward]

Or is it just AIDS that gets singled-out?

Lenz v. UMG

[tepples]

Per Lenz v. UMG , the representative of a copyright owner must consider fair use before sending a notice of claimed infringement.

Re:Lenz v. UMG

[Purity Of Essence]

That confirms that the claimant should act in good faith, believing the material to be infringing. The court merely found that counter-claims of notices believed to have been sent in bad faith cannot simply be dismissed.

DMCA 17 U.S.C. 512(c)(3)(A)(v):

(v) A statement that the complaining party has a good faith belief that use of the material in the manner complained of is not authorized by the copyright owner, its agent, or the law.

The perjury clause is specific to only a portion of the next subsection (emphasis added).

DMCA 17 U.S.C. 512(c)(3)(A)(vi):

(vi) A statement that the information in the notification is accurate, and under penalty of perjury, that the complaining party is authorized to act on behalf of the owner of an exclusive right that is allegedly infringed.

http://www.law.cornell.edu/usc...

Re:Lenz v. UMG

[lagomorpha2]

Has anyone EVER been charged with perjury for issuing a DMCA notice even in situations where there was absolutely no doubt no copyright infringement occurred and it was readily obvious the DMCA was being abused in order to silence people who the sender disagreed with?

There is actually a woman with a youtube channel and blog, girlwriteswhat, who speaks about men's issues (many slashdotters would like her, she's good). The same type of radical feminazis who tore town posters advertising places where she went to speak also abused the DMCA in order to attempt to dox her because according to youtube's policy in order to file a counter-claim you must reveal your real identity to your accuser. Obviously this was an attempt to harass her in her personal life in order to silence her.

Until abusers of DMCA notices start going to prison for false claims, free speech is severely hampered.

Re:Trivializing the Holocaust

[noh8rz10]

i see nothing wrong with denier labels. it is deliberately ignoring and twisting facts and science to serve a political agenda. i had never heard of aids denier. but another great example is climate change denier.

Fair use means nothing to GoogleTube

[Anonymous Coward]

I believe their recent content id system updates proves my point.

Re:Trivializing the Holocaust

[Anonymous Coward]

The HIV deniers are pretty awful. Especially the ones who convince mothers to stop giving their AIDS ridden children medicine. http://whatstheharm.net/hivaid...

You can fuck off with that holocaust comparison though.

Re:Trivializing the Holocaust

[ShanghaiBill]

Using the term denier to compare people to Holocaust deniers trivializes the Holocaust.

About 12 million people died in Nazi death camps, about six million of them Jews. AIDS has resulted in about 30 millions deaths. So far. Thabo Mbeki may be responsible for more deaths than Heinrich Himmler.

cite? I think DMCA only requires "no, I'm not infr

[raymorris]

It's been a few weeks since I read the DMCA, but as I recall the counter-notice just has to say that you're contesting it. You don't have to go into any legal theory of why. It just shows that a) you're responding and b) don't agree that you've infringed.

Re:cite? I think DMCA only requires "no, I'm not i

[jklovanc]

It looks like you are right though you do need to make the following statement;

I swear, under penalty of perjury, that I have a good faith belief that the material was removed or disabled as a result of a mistake or misidentification of the material to be removed or disabled.

I guess specifics are not necessary.

DMCA means they are protected, so counter notice

[raymorris]

DMCA means EVERYTHING to YouTube. If they follow the DMCA procedure, they have safe harbor from both copyright holders and from people falsely accused of infringement. That protection is worth billions to YouTube. The procedure they have to follow to get that protection is:

Upon receipt of a complaint, temporarily remove the video and notify the person who posted it.

When the poster responds saying they don't believe it's infringing, put the video back up.

That second part is called "counter notice". You may have noticed in TFA it said YouTube may lock the account if he doesn't send them a counter notice. He simply needs to quit whining for ten minutes, long enough to type up a counter notice email.

Re:Fuck Beta

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, I hear that Soylent News ...is People! And it has 25% more nerd, which makes it more like veal.

DMCA is an illegal law...

[Anonymous Coward]

DMCA is not legal and therefor cannot be enforced.

Here's why.

Any law that violates other laws cannot be enforced.

Copyright law states unequivocally that a copyright term is limited and that after that term, the copyrighted work has to enter public domain.

Enter the DMCA - if a copyrighted work is encrypted, it can never legally be decrypted according to the DMCA statute.

This means that intentionally, the DMCA extends copyright to infinity as there are no provisions for placing the decryption keys into an escrow account for public domain encryption. Also, the encrpytion methods do not self decrypt if the date is after then end of the copyright term.

Therefor, the DMCA is an illegal law, and cannot be enforced, period.

Now, shove that up the SCOTUS judges asses with a pitchfork for allowing it to stand. What an amazing level of raw stupidity on their honorless' part.

thanks for looking, I was too lazy

[raymorris]

Thanks for looking that up. That is a very specific statement.

The joke of course is

[RevWaldo]

The joke of course is just how much content on YT clearly violates copyright but just sits there for years. I mean entire major motion pictures will be posted by some non-rights-holding Joe Shmoe, remain up for years, and get recommended to you by YT's algorithms and have ads run before they show it to you. So you go ahead and post a short clip from, say, The Jackie Gleason Show from 1960, Jackie Gleason Enterprises sends in a DCMA by the next day, it gets taken down, (fair enough) and YT has the absolute gall to send you a "you're a naughty boy!" email and ask you to watch this oh-so-amusing copyright drivers-ed film which declares pretty much anything not 100% original content is a violation of the rules, while pretty much the vast majority of the content on the site does exactly that.

So the poor analogy is this: kids throwing rocks at the old factory windows in full view of the police. If the factory owner calls the police and complains, the kids are promptly arrested. If the owner says nothing the police gather a crowd around inviting people to watch the kids smash the windows, then mills through the crowd selling tickets to the policeman's ball.

.

Re:The joke of course is

[Anonymous Coward]

You seem to have some misconceptions about copyright.

You are NOT required to constantly monitor for infringements of your copyrights.

You are NOT required to take immediate action against any infringement you found (though if it can be proven you've known and let it continue to rake up damages before you sued, you can lose).

Ignoring one instance of infringement does NOT mean you've forfeited the right to take action against others.

It's all up to the copyright holder to decide how vigorously he wants to protect his works. Monty Python, for example, noticed all the clips of them on YouTube and instead of taking them down one by one went "We know you'll just reupload them right away, so here's some more on official channel (also, here's our store with DVDs and all, hint-hint)", and it still doesn't mean you can just go print and sell your own Monty Python compilation DVDs.

First there has to be an alleged infringement

[tepples]

For someone to be "authorized to act on behalf of the owner of an exclusive right that is allegedly infringed", there has to be "an exclusive right that is allegedly infringed" in the first place. The representative of a copyright owner cannot credibly allege infringement and give no thought to the most common ways that a use is "not an infringement of copyright", as 17 USC 107 through 122 put it. If you're referring solely to what is and isn't "under penalty of perjury", material misrepresentation in bad faith still carries potential criminal penalties even if it does not rise to the level of perjury.

Re:Trivializing the Holocaust

[mwvdlee]

Neither TFS, TFA or GP talks about the holocaust, only you do.
There are plenty other types of deniers, like evolution or global warming.
"Denier" is just a word used to describe somebody who denies what the vast majority accepts as fact.
Denying the use of a word serves nobody except those apposed to discussion.

It's censorship

[macson_g]

Stupidity of these people is undeniable, but this is still censorship. And as a ./ story, it should be filled in appropriate cabinet.

Re:Trivializing the Holocaust

[Anonymous Coward]

your figures are way off.

Re:Trivializing the Holocaust

[DNS-and-BIND]

I think a white person comparing black Africans to Nazis is really out of line.

Re:Trivializing the Holocaust

[jythie]

People do not consider it trivializing because of the numbers, but because of the natures of the two things. There is a big difference between the spread of a disease that impacts a significant but still small percentage of the population and the systematic industrial scale attempt at exterminating a large group of people.

Google Rolls Over Everytime

[JenovaSynthesis]

This is why I tell clients not to use them. Because it takes some bogus copyright claim and Google rolls over and plays dead because they do not want to actually invest time and money into a system and training that actually works to weed out these abusive claims.

Re:Trivializing the Holocaust

[Anonymous Coward]

People consider it "trivializing" because they can't imagine there are any other forms of denialism except for Holocaust denialism.

Reminds me of an old joke, that goes like:
Married couple get in a fight and husband says: "Oh, stop being so loud"
Wife: "You mean I'm shouting? May be I'm barking at you? Like a dog? (turns to mother-in-law) Mom, you hear that? He just called me a bitch!"

I think this is pretty recent tactics in this debates, vaccination and AGW "skeptics" get in on this action too - deflecting the argument with "Denialst? You mean like "denialists" in Holocaust denial? See what poor us have to deal with, they call us literally Nazis!"

PS: There's difference between spread of disease and people wilfully breeding ignorance about said disease, costing lives to those who fell for their rhetoric.

Re:Trivializing the Holocaust

[flyneye]

LOL, this is the first time Ive ever heard of AIDS deniers. No Shit? Some dumbass shoved a tinfoil hat up his ass and rationalized somehow that AIDS doesnt exist? I was in school in the 70s when a friend of mine figured out he was gay, got a divorce, moved to Frisco, contracted AIDS and died. The Rock Hudson jokes were still warm. I can understand that there are holocost deniers, because I have met enough Nazis and Klan Klowns to understand stupid is; as stupid does.
I wanna see the oxygen deniers, or penis deniers or something amusing. Aids deniers? No shit?

Re:Trivializing the Holocaust

[Anonymous Coward]

Something amusing?

How about 20th century round Earth deniers?

Re:Trivializing the Holocaust

[Wootery]

The 'Reply to This' button is intended to be used for, you know, replies.

Re:Trivializing the Holocaust

[Wootery]

You're meant to link to a source, not just whine.

You seem to be right though: regarding totals deaths in Nazi death camps: Wikipedia says over three million. This thread on Answers.com says 6.4 million, not including 'labor camps or executions' of Soviet prisoners, and it notes that Many victims of the Holocaust were not killed in camps. I believe 6.4 million includes both death camps and concentration camps, which might explain the greater number than Wikipedia's 3 million for death camps alone.

No worries, I download it to reupload it

[aissixtir]

well i downloaded the series in case it goes down, it will be a good shot to get many views in my channel once it goes viral :)

Re:Trivializing the Holocaust

[fsck-beta]

Fuck off yuden.

Re:Trivializing the Holocaust

[Anonymous Coward]

You just won 1 Godwin point.

Re:Trivializing the Holocaust

[slashmydots]

Well, if you're wondering where they are:
Public health researchers have attributed 330,000 to 340,000 AIDS deaths, along with 171,000 other HIV infections and 35,000 infant HIV infections, to the South African government's former embrace of HIV/AIDS denialism

backup for a minute...

[mythix]

Wait, we have AIDS deniers now? WTF is wrong with people...

Re:backup for a minute...

[IICV]

What's funny is that a lot of them end up dying of AIDS for some reason (e.g, Christine Maggiore). Weird, huh?

Re:Trivializing the Holocaust

[kurkosdr]

"I wanna see the oxygen deniers" We only have gravity deniers so far. Gravity is "just a theory", the earth and the universe itself are held together by the hand of God (Col 1:17). And yes, some people believe such things http://www.chick.com/reading/t... According to Wikipedia, some professor wrote an article on "Intelligent Falling", but the paper has been retracted and hasn't been archived http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I...

Re:cite? I think DMCA only requires "no, I'm not i

[mrchaotica]

So if you think the material was removed or disabled maliciously and on purpose (rather than due to mistake or misidentification) you're committing perjury by filing the counter-claim?

Re:Trivializing the Holocaust

[tmosley]

I'm sure you don't. Most people don't see the problems with their own bias, and think that the labels they put on groups of people who aren't connected by any common characteristics actually makes them into a single group.

Always nice to compare ignorant tribals to Nazis to people who question things that some people don't want questioned. Really makes one feel GOOD and RIGHT, doesn't it?

Re:Trivializing the Holocaust

[noh8rz10]

I think calling somebody a climate change denier minimizes their concerns and makes them sound unreasonable. both of which are true according to science. you know, the thing that says e = mc^2 and f=ma? also, I have no interest in your radical tea party Christian evangelical gun nut viewpoint, regardless of how you dress it up. I think it's shameless how you try to pervert the public discourse to influence politics to your own ends, at the risk of humanity.

AIDS Denialism

[Anonymous Coward]

AIDS Denialism directly lead to 330 000 deaths in South Africa alone. It's not the Holocaust, but it's on the spectrum.

http://www.badscience.net/2009/04/matthias-rath-steal-this-chapter/

Re:Trivializing the Holocaust

[coolsnowmen]

please explain. Because I'm offended that because of the color of my skin I might not be able to even learn and analyze a historical situation to learn from it and make better decision in the future.

Or is this some comedy rule where one would have to be a black-German to even comment on the subject?

Re:Trivializing the Holocaust

[Wootery]

I wasn't aware of any overzealous legislation regarding holocaust denial. Link please.

There is a reason the West is fading. This is a symptom caused by the same disease.

I suspect it's caused by sensitivities regarding the Holocaust...

Re:Trivializing the Holocaust

[david_thornley]

AIDS kills a large group of people. The Nazi death camps impacted a significant but still small percentage of the population in most places. Since your formulation and my reversal are about equally valid, what was your point?

Re:Trivializing the Holocaust

[lsatenstein]

i see nothing wrong with denier labels. it is deliberately ignoring and twisting facts and science to serve a political agenda. i had never heard of aids denier. but another great example is climate change denier.

He denied it to the day he went to his grave.

Re:cite? I think DMCA only requires "no, I'm not i

[jklovanc]

I think the statement is framed that way to remove the possibility of libel. The mistake could be the idea that malicious intent is a valid reason for a take down notice. So in effect a take down notice due to malicious intent is a mistake.

Blood brothers

[CHIT2ME]

The answer to debunking "AIDS deniers" is to ask them if they would mind becoming blood brothers with someone with aids. I'll bet you would not get any takers!

Re:Trivializing the Holocaust

[Anonymous Coward]

I wanna see the oxygen deniers

Not quite oxygen deniers, but google "breatharians".

Re:Trivializing the Holocaust

[tmosley]

Ad hominem is a logical fallacy, friend.

Science is a PROCESS not a "thing". Science doesn't SAY anything. People say things. Sometimes they say things that are the result of the method of thinking that we call the scientific method. Sometimes they say things that are based on religious thinking. Replace "science" with "God" in your post, and you might understand what I am saying.

Re:Trivializing the Holocaust

[tmosley]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

One to ten years in Austria.

And no, the Holocaust has nothing to do with the decline of the West. The common core of these problems is government overreach into the lives of its citizens.

It is bad news for all of us

[NicoleWiggins21]

There was only where people can get awareness about Aids but we hope they will not..!

Not bring legal proceedings in an open letter

[lenacare]

It's helpful for creating and protect the company's brand and assets with a choice of effective activist approach.But at the same time you also need to ensure that won't make the company become a bullying, and to avoid alienating some important user base.