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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.
No, Don't blame Fox. Don't blame the MPAA. Don't blame the RIAA. And surely don't blame Congress...
The blame lies directly on the consumers and voters, nowhere else. It's simple math.
Good idea: place the blame squarely on the only group that had nothing to do with the problem and have no power to fix anything.
Why should they be blamed for following the takedown process that the MPAA/RIAA forced upon them?
Did the MPAA/RIAA force Youtube to make it as easy as they did? Admittedly, I would probably just not care and give them an automated system as well, but I still think that deserves some blame.
Mainly for failing to perform any checks to see if the party filing the DMCA notice actually has the authority (i.e. copyright ownership) to be able to enforce the notice.
However, such checks would go a long way toward invalidating the defense used by media companies who abuse the DMCA provisions when faced with such patently absurd filings - that they filed this specific request in error as a result of a failure of an automated reporting system, and that nobody at the media company making the filing was aware that the filing was incorrect. In the meantime, sanctions related to the number of DMCA notices received against content uploaded by specific accounts remains triggered even when many/most of the notices are shown to be bogus/in error, meaning that there is no incentive for the media companies to change and there are no satisfactory mechanisms in place for small uploaders to recover their content/challenge the behaviour.
Because instead of brainlessly taking down any video because of a DMCA request they could run it through a sanity check first, but that would take a little bit of effort, so its just easier not to piss off the people with money to sue you.
Or, howabout they just follow the longstanding and bright-line Doctrine of "Innocent until PROVEN guilty", and just refuse to take down the ALLEGEDLY "offending" video until a COURT ORDER is issued?
Anything else (and any law to the contrary) is blatantly Unconstitutional, and void ab initio. I could care less what the DMCA STATUTE says. The Constitution trumps all.
No Court could find differently; and it's HIGH-TIME that that was Tested...
The DMCA doesn't require the party filing the DMCA notice to provide YouTube a copy of the original so they can compare. All it requires is that they claim they own the legal copyright that the other work is infringing.
The problem is that the DMCA (being written by the copyright industry for the copyright industry) provides no punishment, no discouragement for invalid claims. The only punishment is if the filing party knows they don't own the copyright but files the claim anyway. That is, the filing party can always say "I thought I owned the copyright, but I guess I was wrong" and get away with it without even having to say "I'm sorry." That's what's led to the copyright industry filing DMCA claims willy nilly with little regard for accuracy.
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.
Sure, but the algorithm could be a bit smarter. In this case, checking the post date of the alleged infringing video against the air date of the Family Guy episode would be enough to suspect it's not infringing.