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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!
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.
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.
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.
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.