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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.
I came to post similar information. Fair Use is an affirmative defense, meaning you admit you violated the letter of the law (used part of a copyright work without express permission), but you had a legally acceptable reason for doing so. The rights holder has the legal right to claim any use is infringing, and it is up to the user to show they their usage falls within one of the allowable exceptions, such as being a short excerpt, or a parody, or a critique, etc. Where the boundaries are between a short excerpt and a long one, is left as an exercise for the jurist, as are the boundaries for the other exceptions. In this case, Sony claimed the professor used songs without permission, and they are correct, so they complained to Youtube. At that point, it became the professor's responsibility to prove his use was allowable under the law according to the fair use doctrine (note it is a doctrine and not technically a law), which he appears to have done, at least to Youtube's satisfaction.