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Copyright Professor's Lecture Removed From YouTube Over Sony Content-ID Claim (torrentfreak.com)
ShaunC writes: William Fisher, a professor of intellectual property law at Harvard, posted to YouTube a lecture titled "The Subject Matter of Copyright: Music." In discussing the complexities of music licensing and cover songs, Fisher played several short clips of music by Hendrix, Santana, and others. Sony responded by having the lecture removed from YouTube, ignoring any fair use protection in excerpting works for educational purposes. While the video was restored after public backlash, most YouTube users don't have Harvard Law School backing them up. Once again, a company has issued overreaching copyright claims with no penalty or consequence for harming an innocent party.
Youtube has a bit of a larger problem. Nobody gets punished for false claims. You don't even need a person, because Youtube will automate it for you. And while people can file claims as quickly as they'd like, instantly taking videos down or stealing ad revenue, it can take months to go through the review process of putting a video back up. It's a crazily one-sided system. Nostalgia Critic, a long-time movie reviewer, talks about it in a recent video.
If you claim a) you own copyright or represent the owner of the copyright on a particular Jimi Hendrix song, b) the defendant copied the song (in part or in entirety), c) the part of the song is not valid fair use, and d) the defendant did not secure permission before copying, the only claim subject to perjury charges is a). As long as a) is true, issuing a take-down notice even when knowing one or more of b)-d) are false has no consequence.
The movie and music industries got vastly more than their money's worth with our copyright laws, including the DMCA.
As much as I hate copyright trolls, Sony in primis; people most of time really don't understand the fair use doctrine.
What is and what is not fair use can only be decided by a judge and it varies case by case. There is no law stating what is precisely fair use and what isn't. And this is what gives the copyright trolls such an advantage. They have simply to say it's not fair use and bingo you're censored. And your only legal recourse is to go to court. And even then because fair use doctrine is so vague it's possible the judge is going to go against you. The situation would be much easier if instead of the fair use doctrine we had a law stating exactly and clearly what are the boundaries of fair use.
You need to use paper -- the tried and true method of all things legal. Youtube gets too many crackpots, like you, doing this sort of shit, so they ignore you. Serve an actual from-a-lawyer DMCA notice to youtube (and Sony), and they will act on it. They cannot legally ignore it. I suspect 100% of your takedown requests were complete bunk, and Sony's legal team would toss you into a wood chipper if you actually filed them.
On the other hand, the nostalgia critic pretty much puts the whole movie in his "review" videos while contributing not much more than making funny faces and pretending to be upset. His content is terrible, he's downright plagiarizing the movies he reviews and he produces bottom of the barrel content. I'm not defending youtube's current system, but that guy has no room to complain when he's downright uploading whole movies and contributing nothing to the equation.
They're not legally obligated to let complainants use the automated fast track system. As long as they respond to an actual on-paper notice within a reasonable time of receiving it by mail, they're within the law.
There's also no reason they can't allow the uploader to counter the claim instantly and put the video back up.
This thread prompted me to watch one of these "reviews." So I picked the first one I saw that was a movie I'd actually seen, "A.I. Artificial Intelligence."
First of all, the video is entirely obnoxious. That anyone considers this to be interesting is beyond my understanding. It's just some idiot who honestly has nothing to say, but just wants to make a "review" and so he looks for every criticism he can, because that's what reviewers on YouTube do. ...and it isn't because I care for the movie, I'll be the first to agree that most movies are complete shit, but there's a difference between talking about what really makes a movie fail and simply pointing out any and every flaw you see as you watch the movie so that you have an excuse to show as many clips from it as possible. ...but unfortunately, that's what passes for a "review" on YouTube.
That video isn't a review, it's a summary with some commentary. Summaries are derivative works, even small ones, but especially summaries that are 25% the length of the original movie. To claim that this is fair use is to tell Reader's Digest that they can create digest versions of books without paying the original author a dime as long as they toss some shit commentary in the margins and call it "a review." Obviously that would never fly in the real world, so why is it OK on YouTube? Because they're amateurs and can't be held to the high standards of creating reviews that are valuable enough to stand up on their own? ...except that they're not amateurs. Most of YouTube is just the worst kinds of people doing whatever gives them more views, as more views is more money.
Fair use isn't "I get to include some clips from other people's work in order to make my work more valuable," it's "I get to include clips from other people's work when doing so is necessary in order to talk about it." Like that douche said in his own video, it's about freedom of speech in that sometimes it's difficult to talk about something without making reference to it. However, one could easily have made a review of "A.I. Artificial Intelligence" without including 30 fucking minutes of footage from the movie. As example, consider how I've managed to review this douche's review without quoting a single word of it.