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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.
and yes PEOPLE, not corporations, but the people making these false claims the system will remain the same.
hail corporate!
While DMCA is not likely mentioned, it likely is involved. And the reason there is no penalty is because Sony only needs to prove that it is a copyright holder, not that the video that was taken down is actually in violation of copyright.
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.
Hopefully with the whole Harvard Law Faculty behind him he can get away with it and show how broken the system is.
Google did exactly what the law requires them to do. Sony made the false claim, they should be the ones that pay the penalty. And also the people in government who created something as broken as the DMCA.
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.
Right now, Youtube takes the video down as soon as a DMCA claim is made against the video. One of the biggest issues is that youtubers depend on the ad revenue which is lost when these bogus DMCA claims take the video down (or worse, they redirect the ad revenue to the company that made the false claim).
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.
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.
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.
Of course they don't have any consequences.
They got exactly the fucking laws they bought, ones with they can make unfounded accusations with no burden of proof, and which people are expected to jump to and enforce or face their own penalties ... make no mistake about it, this is exactly what they wanted, and exactly what they got.
And, they've managed to get the US government on the fucking payroll to ensure every other damned country has the same absurd bullshit. And companies like YouTube pretty much have to jump and say "yessir boss".
The DMCA and related laws are supposed to give them all the power, and no accountability. That's what they paid for, that's what they got.
This is what was said when it was happening, and this is what has been said ever since. But let's not pretend this is the first we're learning about just how defective these laws are.
These damned laws a broken by design, because they were written by and for the copyright cartel, and the rest of us can go get stuffed.
Blame the idiot politicians who gave this shit to them -- Sony and these guys? They paid those clowns fair and square. And they keep delivering in the form of even more fucking broken garbage, like the IP provisions in the TPP which will more or less the USA in championing the rights of multinational corporations like the puppets they are.
Hell, DHS (and by extension ICE) are now the enforcement arm of the copyright cartel. Welcome to the awesome future where corporations have more rights than you do.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
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.
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?!
However, if the punishment is so toothless as to encourage corporations to, in turn, encourage their employees to continue to break the rules
If this is true then one way to fix it might be to turn the tables on the corporations: report their content and have it removed so they can see first hand how one sided the rules are. With any luck they may go crying to their lobbyists and the law will be changed to include some penalty for abuse of the system.
Notionally, that lawyer is responsible for the notice. But the law has a 'good faith' provision, that clears the lawyer if the notice was issued in good faith. As everyone is interpreting that 'the computer told me to put it on the notice, I didn't check anything' as 'good faith', the penalties in the act have no effect.
If only web sites were keeping track of videos like these as 'canaries', and automatically rejecting as invalid any notices that include them. A notice that includes a video that is so clearly not infringing could not be considered 'valid'.
Prediction for end of Universe #42: Fencepost error in Quantum_bogosort.cpp
The record companies also shook down the producers of the 2008 film, The Wrecking Crew, a documentary about a very few, unknown, session musicians who played on innumerable hit records from the 1950s and 1960s. The release of the film was delayed for over two years -- until the companies were paid, in essence, for the use of the artists' own performances.