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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.
If someone legitimately infringes content they eventually cut off your ability to upload content. Why can't they do the same from the other direction? If someone issues too many bogus claims they lose the ability to issue more claims.
It is that simple, if an account has the right credentials a far more stringent process should be used to scrutinise their content if there is a complaint, and that process should be designed to ensure the rights of all parties are fully protected.
Save the automated kill scripts for Mr. Fakename and his 2 week old account.
So the solution is simple. The professor should post some cat video on YouTube, claim copyright, and then file to have every video from Sony removed via a DMCA request.
You actually can't do that. I've tried.
Since it is a completely legal and sanctioned in law action to do, I don't mind admitting this.
I setup a shell LLC with a youtube channel and over about a month filed over 50 copyright claims against sony entertainment, plus 4 copyright take down requests.
Youtubes automated system for limiting an account after the 4th claim request, which works consistently for any and all other channels, is silently ignored and dropped for Sony.
They are quite literally on an "Exempted from legal and evidence supported allegations of criminal activity" list.
For any other random channel, if you make 4 claims at the same time against their channel, youtube takes that channels past month of monitization and gives it to you, limits your video uploads to 15 min max, prevents you from filing your legal takedown counter claims, and can even have the channel outright deleted.
Anyone with a youtube channel can legally do this to anyone else with one.
But do the exact same thing to Sony and nothing.
Which also means, since no one is allowed to accuse Sony of actual crimes perpetrated on youtube, that Sony is legally allowed to take all of your videos music and other content, post it on their channel as-is completely unaltered, and claim it as their own property.
After that they can submit all of your audio to their own content ID matching, so any video you ever post in the future where your own voice says any word that you have already used in a past video, Sony owns your voice and you are in violation of copyright law.
Even if you were to go to court to sue Sony for infringing your copyright, the "evidence" that youtubes content ID explicitly states your own work is owned by Sony and not you can easily be used against you.
I fear many judges looking between Sony and some twit on the internet are going to just assume Sony is making the truthful and accurate statements, and clearly you must be wrong.
The solution is to give the author of the video some time to counter-claim that the video is not infringing, without automatically taking the video down. That or punishing the company that made the false claim. Either works, the later probably would work better, but it would be hard to enact in practice.
The solution is to sue the offending party.
The professor has damages from lost revenue, so should have standing to sue. Google was only doing what the law requires, so the professor should sue Sony in civil court.
Or perhaps start a class-action suit against Sony.
In engineering, there are lots of interesting technical problems and lots of engineers with spare time.
In law, there are lots of legal problems, and also lots of self-proclaimed "under employed" lawyers.
In engineering, we have a world of open source software, operating systems, electronic designs, cheap laptops and inexpensive microcontroller boards whose specs rival a desktop PC of ten years ago.
In law, we've got... an endless parade of rights violations, injustice, and unfair abuse.
The victim is a law professor at Harvard, for god's sake! Why doesn't he file suit and get some of his students to help with the case hands-on?
Maybe I expect too much of lawyers. They're probably wired differently than engineers.
What the hell is wrong with people? Sue them for damages based on lost ad revenues if the video was monetized. There are no consequences to a fake DMCA takedown but doing almost anything to someone that causes them to lose money means they can sue you for damages. Why does nobody do this?!