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Fox 'Stole' a Game Clip, Used It In Family Guy and DMCA'd the Original (torrentfreak.com)
An anonymous reader shares a TorrentFreak report: This week's episode of Family Guy included a clip from 1980s Nintendo video game Double Dribble showing a glitch to get a free 3-point goal. Perhaps surprisingly the game glitch is absolutely genuine and was documented in a video that was uploaded to YouTube by a user called 'sw1tched' back in February 2009. Interestingly the clip that was uploaded by sw1tched was the exact same clip that appeared in the Family Guy episode on Sunday. So, unless Fox managed to duplicate the gameplay precisely, Fox must've taken the clip from YouTube. Whether Fox can do that and legally show the clip in an episode is a matter for the experts to argue but what followed next was patently absurd. Shortly after the Family Guy episode aired, Fox filed a complaint with YouTube and took down the Double Dribble video game clip on copyright grounds. Perhaps YouTube should also be blamed for this.
Why should YouTube also be blamed for this? Why should they be blamed for following the takedown process that the MPAA/RIAA forced upon them?
"Murphy was an optimist" - O'Toole's commentary on Murphy's Law
The only right and proper response is, when the original video returns to YouTube, to DMCA the Fox video. It will likely last a microsecond due to Fox lawyers being all over it, but they deserve to have to deal with that shit.
Sounds like a perfect opportunity for a kickstarter to fund legal action against Fox.
If the video owner can catch them for the copyright infringement they can hammer them for Perjury for the DMCA notice.
DMCA is used far too often for things that do not make sense. The only people that really profit from it all is the lawyers, especially in a case like this where there is evidence of prior art.
Shame on Fox. Shame on MPAA. Shame on RIAA. Shame on all of the Congress critters for creating this legal pile of excrement.
I upload for preservation. Some Italian music group filed a DMCA against it. Turns out some duo had lifted a major section of the intro (all of one video file on the psx) for their mix.
I disputed in a rant and they rescinded the notice.
This shit is getting out of hand. Someone has to stop this, and as I'm typing this rant, I feel YouTube has capability and responsibility to do so.
I'm sorry, but your opinion seems to be wrong.
If I were to download a song and listen to it in the privacy of my own home/car/phone at work, I would be liable for a lot of money damages. But Fox gets to take a clip from YouTube, put it into a very successful commercial show and then turn around and claim that it came from them in the first place AND suffer no financial damage.
Interesting. It's like the law has been twisted so that it only benefits the wealthy and well-to-do.
Congress. Because it was Congress that was purchased by the media industry, and told by their media industry overlords to pass over-reaching digital restriction laws.
Not only can robots not detect fair use, nor they cannot detect when the work is used with the permission of the copyright owner neither where the company running the robot does not own the copyright but is using it with permission nor where the work is being used with the permission of the robot's owners.
30 minutes of valuable airtime every Sunday by airing new episodes of that show, which started going downhill since season 5 and has been unwatchable garbage post season 6.
This should surprise no one. This is entirely consistent with FAX News' business practices and 'ethics'.
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
if( alleged_pirate_video.date family_guy_video.date ) //holy shit snacks, it looks like the pirate is a content creator! //TODO: just in case this ever happens we should return definitely_not_a_pirate, but it's not worth typing // three extra characters for something that can obviously never happen amirite?
{
return definitely_a_pirate;
}
I think DMCA should be killed, but I know politicians and businesses won't see it that way.
The best compromise at this point should be rewriting the law to make Fox, and others that abuse DMCA, pay damages (punitive) automatically when they make "mistakes" like this. Significant damages.
As it happens, the NYT just had an Op-Ed today about how the DMCA needs to be strengthened because YouTube doesn't make it easy enough for the **AA to take down videos.
It'd be funny if it weren't so sad.
Its automatic, youtube system do it, no claim is necessary for certain user-channels.
There is no need to quote stole here. Fox has not only copied the video (which would justify the quotes), they have asserted ownership of the work (actual theft).
It's funny how it's primarily the entities that whine about infringement and call it theft that commit the actual thefts.
Where is the doubt?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
> [Youtube should be blamed] mainly for failing to perform any checks to see if the party filing the DMCA notice actually has the authority
That's not the way the law works. Under DMCA, Youtube isn't the judge and jury, they don't have any subjective decisions they are allowed to make. Youtube has little to no choice here. Here's the process that the DMCA law specifies:
1. Complainant notifies hoster (youtube) that they claim infringement.
2. Youtube may immediately contact respondent (uploader).
3. Youtube temporarily disables the content.
4. Respondent may send Youtube a counter-notice, saying that they dispute the original DMCA notice.
5. Upon receiving counter-notice, Youtube re-enables the content.
6. Complainant may file suit in federal court (expensive).
The process is pretty well set in stone by law. The one place where Youtube has some choice to make is that they have to disable/remove the content "quickly", but how quickly? A host can choose to contact the uploader and give them 24 hours to counter-notice before removal, or they can remove it right away and put it back when they get a counter-notice.
I wish more people understood the counter-notice part, meaning the content goes right back up if you dispute the notice. You just reply saying "this notice must have been sent by mistake" and sign it (forms are available online). If more people understood about counter-notices and an amendment to the law added statutory damages for reckless filing of improper notices, the system would probably work pretty well. As it is, reckless notices aren't penalized enough to matter, and most people seem to think that there's nothing they can do if they are on the wrong end of an erroneous notice. Just send back a counter-notice. You don't have to argue your case, just state that you think the notice is wrong and leave it at that.
Then Fox is guilty of perjury as they do not have the rights to that clip regardless of whether they used it in their show. Nintendo is the only party that could legally issue the takedown.
Sorry, teleporters just kill you and then make a copy. A perfect, soul-less copy.
If everyone hosted their own content from their own systems we wouldn't have these problems. If the demand existed we would trivially have the capability to publish easily. Sane naming and caching architectures either P2P and or hosted by ISPs that don't discriminate and play favorites like current CDNs would be widely deployed to facilitate distribution.
The more everyone sucks on the teet of big content to do EVERYTHING for them the more the Internet becomes Cable TV. The more capabilities are not exercised the more impossible and outlandish it seems to do anything for yourself.
While youtube is convenient the opportunity costs in allowing a handful of companies to own a majority of eyeballs and bandwidth are enormous.
The very premise of the Internet is that it is a network of PEERS not a network of SPECTATORS.
1. Fox does not produce Family Guy, they don't determine the content
2. The take down process is automated by spidering YouTube content and searching for matching digital signatures of images. The legal firm that Fox employees blindly listens to the algorithm and submits the requests
The issue at hand is resources, expectations, and good karma. What if for companies, with good a track record of legitimately filing take down notices, those videos get removed immediately and then the uploader can file an appeal to get it back if the request was not legit. However, if the company abuses their power, and many of their requests are bogus, their karma points go down which triggers a different process where Google employee must review and validate the request prior to the video being removed.
It seems that it's the ContentID system, not DCMA takedown notices, that caused the clip to be pulled. ContentID is a pre-emptive system built by Google, as part of a settlement with Viacom
One should note it was Konami, not the uploader, who made Double Dribble. So, it's entirely possible that Konami gave permission to Family Guy and/or Konami got the clip taken down.
"Whether Fox can do that and legally show the clip in an episode is a matter for the experts to argue" is a scary statement. It seems like it should be a known thing whether companies are allowed to rebroadcast work you put on Youtube without further compensation.
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Asked how Taylor could have been destroyed... how an actual human being might possibly have joined the counterfeit T-shirts, figurines, coffee mugs and life-size cardboard stand-ups collected in bins and being fed into an industrial incinerator, her agent shrugged. "These people are not hired for their brains. Or maybe she just slipped?"
It was also suggested that Swift may have wandering around the facility having neglected her hair and personal appearance. "It's a closely guarded secret, but most celebrities undergo significant transformation at the hands of cosmetology professionals. In their unpolished natural form they could easily be confused for poor quality imitation merchandise. It's a dead giveaway. We take quality control very seriously."
In this way, Swifts proverbial 'bad hair day' could have become the worst day, ever.
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[not necessarily the news]
<blink>down the rabbit hole</blink>
Disney taking *public domain* works, turning them into a cartoon movie franchise, and then slapping a copyright on it from thence forth.
The golden rule has just operated perfectly, to wit: those who have the gold make the rules.
On y va, qui mal y pense!
This episode so was completed last July.
It could be the case that Fox obtained permission from Konami, copyright owner of Double Dribble, and then used the clip pursuant to 17 USC 103(a), which states that an unauthorized derivative work is not eligible for copyright, and/or a supposition that the uploader's contribution to the clip do not "represent an original work of authorship" (17 USC 101).
I think sw1tched might just have some nice royalties coming now.
(If at first you don't succeed, do it different next time!)
YouTube shouldn't be blamed. They are just following the law.
Fox should be blamed though, for filing a frivolous (not to mention false) copyright claim.
Those complaining about "innocent until proven guilty" or that there should be some sort of vetting by YouTube of DMCA takedown notices before they are enforced likely aren't very familiar with the DMCA, which affords content uploaders (such as 'sw1tched') the right to submit a DMCA counter-claim (in this case, a simple letter to YouTube asserting that the content doesn't infringe on Fox's intellectual property) at which point YouTube would reinstate the video.
Furthermore, there is some precedent for suing the party that made the infringement claim. In order to file the original DMCA notice, Fox's lawyers had to assert (under penalty of perjury) that they had "a good faith belief that use of the material" was not permitted per their copyrights. If 'sw1tched' can demonstrate that they acted in bad faith (such as by pointing to the fact they DMCAed a video clearly uploaded way before this episode was created, and possibly taken for the purposes of creating the episode) then he wins.
Regardless, this wasn't Fox News
Still co-owned. Except in the most egregious cases, such as the SOPA blackout of January 2012, FOX News is unlikely to cover opposition to the expansion of copyright because it shares a parent company with a movie studio that benefits from said expansion and thus benefits from voters being uninformed of the ramifications of copyright maximalism. This is where CNN, MSNBC, and FOX News are all expected to slant the same way because of Warner Bros. Pictures, Universal Studios, and 20th Century Fox respectively.
Disney owns copyright in elements it introduced, such as character costume designs, names of characters whom the Grimms or H. C. Andersen or whoever didn't name (such as Ariel, Dopey, and the like), and plot changes that completely nullify the moral of the story (as described in Willard Gaylin's On Being and Becoming Human and elsewhere). It doesn't own copyright in anything described in the original work, and others are free to make sequels not based on Disney's copyrighted additions. Hence Pinocchio and the Emperor of the Night, Happily Ever After, and Shrek.
If Konami were the claimant, we'd have another #FUCKONAMI event. But Fox is. This means Fox is claiming to be "authorized to act on behalf of the owner of an exclusive right that is allegedly infringed", which would imply that Fox is either the owner or the exclusive licensee of this element of Double Dribble.
YouTube is a fucking disgrace.
The very premise of the Internet is that it is a network of PEERS
In practice, three factors killed this premise:
Dial-up networking The characteristics of Internet access over POTS and ISDN encouraged users to connect only when viewing documents or when posting them to a better-connected server. Asymmetric home connections ADSL is generally always on, unlike POTS and ISDN. But it offers upstream throughput unsuitable for serving documents to the same extent that one views documents, again encouraging people to post them to a better-connected server. And some DSL ISPs, too accustomed to the old POTS model and too cash-strapped to make their subscribers true peers, used PPPoE to replicate the old circuit-switched model of the POTS and ISDN data link layers. Carrier-grade network address translation IPv4 address exhaustion caused some ISPs to put home subscribers behind CGNAT, making their computers unable to accept incoming connections. The workaround is to bounce documents off a "supernode" run on a better-connected server.All three of these factors encouraged users to lease servers, a practice that would later come to be called "the cloud" to disguise it.
musopen.org released the MusOpen DVD to the public domain in 2012 via archive.org -- I've received more than a dozen copyright claims about videos I've uploaded with this music.
Please watch this video for a summary:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T_aEKvpDDNI
Thank you.
Where the left hand does not have a clue about the right hand, content creators took the clip from youtube and then someone reported to the legal dept about seeing it on youtube.
Oddly enough, back in the 80's there was Copyright, but it only applied in the sense that others could not reproduce and sell for a profit, but once you purchased the game, it became YOUR property to do with as you please.
"Piracy" as it was called was actually legal at least in the sense that you could make as many copies and GIVE it away as you wanted, and that was very common in that time.
This resulted in a number of court cases, and the courts finally ruled that companies COULD issue a license with the software, and so the EULA began, along with keys used on installs.
If this is one of those games, then Fox may be well within their right to use it in their work, but if that's the case, then so is the person that uploaded the video.
On a side note, companies can license a game, or video or music, but there is no law REQUIRING you to have one. It is in effect a contract which you can decline and skirt around, but selling the items for profit would still be a copyright violation.
Yes, there was a recent major case on that. The recipient was a major cable TV company. The complainant sent a shit-ton of emails which looked like complaints, but didn't conform to DMCA requirements. Eventually, the cable company started directing email from that company to /dev/null. Complainant sued and the cable company was held liable.
The law, DMCA, nowhere has the words "except if the complaint comes from someone who sends a lot of junk complaints". The law directs how A complaint needs to be handled, without any reference to prior communications from the same person.
The cable company could have argued, and a different court might agree, that while the company did fail to comply with DMCA, the damages were CAUSED by the complainant's spammy deluge of bogus complaints. If some other court accepted that argument, they'd be "guilty", but not have to pay any damages. That's a theoretical argument they COULD make, to some other court. The actual judge in the real case said that every complaint has to be acted on, and the spammy complainant was awarded X million in damages.
Now I'm going to get pedantic and answer -exactly- the wording of what you asked. ...
> Does the law prevent Youtube from
Technically, they don't HAVE to follow the DMCA process, but if they don't, they become fully liable for any infringement by their users. Most people hosting content, such as web hosting companies, would say it would be insane to take on that kind of liability. Just follow the DMCA process and you're not liable to either party. Youtube has tip toed close to the line, potentially opening themselves up to liability.
I stopped watching any Seth MacFarlane garbage once I found out he was blackmailed on 9/11.
The DCMA is a law. Congress makes laws. When bad laws are illegal only bag congressmen will have laws. wait, no. I mean, if you don't like a law, find out who your congressman was, and piss on their lawn. no wait, don't do that. send them a nasty letter.
oh, and register to vote, and vote against them, even if it means voting for Kang the Destroyer of Worlds.
Include a checkbox in the video submission process that grants Youtube legal authority to issue an automatic DMCA-compliant protest of any take down order on behalf of the submitter.
This forces the accuser to take things to the next level without interfering with content availability.
Being too being to manage is no excuse. Hell, we already have the RICO statute that allows left hand of a criminal organization to go to jail for a criminal act the right hand perpetrated without need to show communication between them.
Which is a great idea, if you can afford to employ enough people to do that. The rightsholders should be responsible for screening their takedown requests. The problem is that there's no limit placed on the supposed rightsholders to prevent them from abusing the system for automated takedowns without reviewing them first. Again, that was forced on YouTube by the rights agencies. Again, why blame YouTube?
Youtube's inability to performing due diligence for DMCA take-down notices shouldn't be our problem; it's youtube's problem. If they don't like it, they can spend some of their billions in profits to lobby congress to repeal the DMCA or spend that money to hire more warm bodies to deal with it.
The DMCA notice is a sworn statement, the issuer swears under penalty of perjury that the information in the notice is accurate. In this case it clearly wasn't, so perjury applies. Who gets to apply that penalty tho?
--
Stay tuned for some shock and awe coming right up after this messages!
check the dates they were posted, seems simple
School, must be out, lotta feels about things coupled with total ignorance of the law. Seriously, if you want to actually change laws, you need to learn about how they work and how the system works. The system cares zero about your feels.
Looks like the takedown has been reversed as you can view the original video at https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
It's not a typo if you understood the meaning!
OK, so since youtube has to act on every notice, what if random people would file notices against these corporations? Sure, they could revert it back, but with high enough traffic it could become a burden to them.
Takedown requests under the guise of the DMCA are the trademark equivalent of patent trolls. Current law really doesn't give much recourse to those harmed by spurious requests like this one. What about the artist who had his original work taken down because someone simply didn't 'like' it? Power without control or accountability.
Organization? You must be joking..
I imagine the entertainment companies would quickly automate the counter-notices if they started recieving a ton of frivilous notices. They've already automated sending notices (starting a dispute), it seems that automatically filing a counter would be less risky for them. If I were them, I'd probably sue a few of the people filing frivilous notices too, to make an example of them.
The counter-notice includes an attestation under perjury of your name and contact information, so they'd know who to sue.
Perhaps more importantly, the resultant deluge of counter-notices would cause the important counter-notices against the media companies to get lost in the shuffle. That takes away our best defense against DMCA abuse.
I think there are three things that ordinary people can do to help make the situation better:
a) Spread the word about counter-notices. On platforms other than Youtube, these generally work very well and are easy to so.
b) Email your congressman when DMCA-related bills are being discussed, supporting stronger penalties for abuse.
c) Some people won't like this, but the following facts are true. There are 100 times as many independent artists than there are corporate-label artists promoted by record companies and other media companies. The media companies hire Rightscorp and other DMCA "enforcers" , and use DRM, because they see piracy damaging their business - if there was no piracy, Rightscorp would go out of business and DRM wouldn't exist. Therefore, rather than pirating a corporate artist (and giving Rightscorp a reason to exist), use songs and videos from independent artists. Many independent bands will let you have their music for free and use it in your videos, etc. If you do that rather than pirating Justin Bieber, you've taken away any reason for Rightscorp to exist, given MPAA the finger, followed the law (not stopping to their level), and possibly got better music too.
I cringed when I saw this. Please don't bring this formula to /. it is just about the only way anybody can write a headline any more.
Man does xxx with a yyy but what followed next was zzz.
I'm thoroughly sick of seeing this on the web. Please, not here too.
If I had a DeLorean... I would probably only drive it from time to time.
You deserve it guys. Family guy is a lame show and it deserve to be cancelled. Is cancelled and you vote with petitions and money to bring it back. Next time that they steal a clip from *YOU* and you are used, don't blame You Tube please. ;)
It's Youtubes fucking responsibility to make those resources available (people, AI, whatever) as to be able to operate respecting the law. Or just fold shop.
I have to do that too, ffs.
Well then, there's an easy solution. We (the public) should simply file copyright notices with youtube for every single piece of content uploaded by the offending parties, the moment it appears. Hot new movie trailer? Too bad, it's gone.
Fight them with their own weapons. Deny them access to the general public. And apologize afterwards with a shrug and "my bad, I thought I owned that copyright".
When something is STOLEN, the original item no longer remains.
Fox's DMCA abuse raised their use of the clip from a simple 'piracy' (copyright infringement) to an actual theft – no single-quotes are needed around the word in this case.
The original is gone. Stolen.
Huffington Post stole one of my clips and then when I served them with a DCMA notice, they *tried* to retroactively claim it was there. Fortunately I was able to protect my content, but it was only because I was firm about my intentions, otherwise, they would have kept using my content without permission.
There are 2 groups of people you can make fun of on the Internet without fear of attack. The illiterate, and the Amish.
Every time they do this.
Here is a simple solution that would greatly reduce such bad DMCA filings:
DMCAs can be filed just like now. But submitting a DMCA is a legally binding statement by the submitter that the their own work and the work they file about are the same IP. Now if the accused can show that he clearly owns his work then he also gains the rights to the submiters work no matter how ridiculous the DMCA claim was. Or especially when it was ridiculous. There could be a percentage ownership transfere decided by a judge. The submitter claimed both works are the same so whoever owns the accused work owns both works.
Wouldn't it be nice to see how fast media giants would stop sending wrong DMCA after they lost a few billion dollar productions to such false claims?