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Samsung Forced YouTube To Pull GTA 5 Mod Video Because It Showed Galaxy Note 7 As Bomb (redmondpie.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Redmond Pie: The Galaxy Note 7 wasn't just recalled, it was cancelled. For good. And that makes Samsung very cranky indeed. So when YouTube user HitmanNiko created a video showing a Grand Theft Auto 5 mod in which Galaxy Note 7 handsets can be used as grenades, it's perhaps somewhat understandable that someone inside Samsung took offense to the idea. What's incomprehensible though is the fact that Samsung has apparently set about trying to erase that video, and presumably others like it, from the Internet. The first step? Forcing YouTube to remove HitmanNiko's video. Trying to view the video now does nothing but display a message which says that the video is "no longer available due to a copyright claim by Samsung Electronics America" which leaves quite the bad taste in our mouths. The biggest issue here is that this is arguably the worst misuse of the DMCA we have ever come across, simply because nothing was copied, unless Samsung is trying to claim that by making the in-game grenades look like Galaxy Note 7 smartphones then the video creator was in fact in breach of copyright.
(uh... oops...)
In its most general sense, a fair use is any copying of copyrighted material done for a limited and “transformative” purpose, such as to comment upon, criticize, or parody a copyrighted work.
Source.
If that video isn't parody I don't know what is.
Someone set us up the Note 7
they got no signal, however.
Sig Follows: "Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself." -- Mark Twain
And that's the problem here and in other cases like it.
It has to be checked-off by a court to say exactly that. Only after that step can the guy turn around and sue for damages and lost wages. It's as backward as you can get. It's putting the onus on the defense to prove that they're _not_ infringing. Assume guilt much?
Copyright law needs a top to bottom reform. Period.
using copyright as a friendly kudgel to silence "creative" speech online is a time honored tradition embraced by some of the largest multinational media companies in the world (AKA your friends.) But remember, its only successful when youtube posters remember to cower in fear, recoil in shame, and sink into remorseful consumption of approved content and products offered through their favourite online vendors and endorsed by their favourite super celebrities and brand icons!
Never use the tools provided by Youtube to challenge your DMCA takedown, and whatever you do, try to ignore the crushing blowback of the Streisand effect that inevitably comes surging through online media outlets --seemingly unstoppable in its pervasiveness-- in response to friendly DMCA takedown notification. Surely a nasty review or, heaven forbid, inventive online gaming content, wouldnt be instantaneously copied, shared, and disseminated endlessly online as a response to whats widely perceived as an "abusive cabal" of "predatory media conglomerates"
Good people go to bed earlier.
I, too, believe it's Fair Use, and he has a right to counterclaim. But this takes money, and the desire for a long fight, going through Discovery, showing damages, and all the other processes of tort law.
It's better to raise this issue and show that Samsung did the totally wrong thing, starting at their bad QA, bad engineering, bad process control for field testing, and an even worse procedure once the problem was found.
Corporations don't like to eat humble pie, eat crow, or whatever metaphor you'd like to use for admitting they screwed up. This is a PR disaster, IMHO.
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
Has nobody heard of the Streissand effect?
Rome taught me patience and assiduous application to detail. Virtues which temper the boldness of great, general views.
is this the one? https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
No, you just need to STFU. For fucks sake, does literally every god damn thing have to mention the election? No, no it doesn't. I get it, you're a small minded individual, and this is all you can think of to say. But shut the fuck up. We're what, a bit less then three weeks from the election? Everywhere you go all people are talking about is how much Trump sucks or how much Clinton sucks and on and on and on. I think I speak for most people when I say we're fucking sick and tired of hearing about it. This story doesn't involve Trump. This story doesn't involve Clinton, Fuck you for trying to bring them in to it.
Video's here:
https://youtu.be/6EK-Qy_UZX4?t...
I had a chuckle at the mere description of the mod, and never would've heard of it without Samsung's "help." I'll have to thank them for the laugh at their expense!
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
It's putting the onus on the defense to prove that they're _not_ infringing. Assume guilt much?
I agree it is a problem but not for the reason you give. Samsung will still have to prove that the defendant infringed their copyright. The problem is one of risk. The cost of the court case is the problem here. Samsung is, for the moment ay least, a multi-billion dollar company with huge pockets. Win or lose the cost of this type of court case is a blip in their budget. However for the defendant the financial risk is huge: he could lose his life savings on a case like this.
This is the serious problem with the law today. Corporations can afford to bring frivolous cases knowing that the defendant cannot afford the time and money risk. What we ned to have is a system where the financial risk is comparable. For example perhaps if a corporation loses a case like this they should be required to compensate the defendant with one years salary of their highest paid employee. Who knows perhaps this might also help limit currently insanely high executive pay.
Enjoy video of this clever and humorous mod!
https://youtu.be/6EK-Qy_UZX4?t...
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
I've had a Youtube video taken down years ago for a claim, and got it reinstated. It didn't cost me anything, in fact I think when I got notice of the take-down I was given a form to fill out by Youtube to challenge it. I simply copy-pasted a few statements from Wikipedia about fair-use and a few days later it was brought back to my account. So unless Youtube has changed since then, it shouldn't take money, just a bit of time.
I believe the original is on this page: http://fraghero.com/gta-5-mod-... scroll down a bit.
Creative writing/art/etc was doing well before anyone thought of copyright.
No, actually it wasn't. Before copyright, writers got no credit and no money for their work. Most of the works surviving from the middle ages we don't even know who wrote them-- the authors are called things like "the Pearl poet" by scholars, because all we know of him (?) is that he (or she) wrote the Pearl sequence (and Gawain).
Copyright law might be broken, but no copyright is not the solution.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
I'm guessing that you're heavily invested in a datacenter company and are trying to lower the cost of hard drives by causing Youtube to flood the market with all of the excess drives they'd have in such a scenario.
"99 dead duelists of Dios on the wall. 99 dead duelists of Dios! Take one's ring, pass it around..."
I don't think copyright is totally bad. For example, I recently published my first novel. Without copyright law, someone else could grab my novel and start printing/selling their own copies of it. I'd wind up competing with my own novel. Then there are issues of film studios being able to take anyone's work and make movies based off of it without compensating the author at all. I'd have to spend a lot of time and money filing lawsuits to make them stop and, without copyright law, I might not be successful.
The big problem with copyright law isn't its existence. It's the length. Copyright was originally 14 years plus a one-time 14 year extension. This isn't so bad. The novel I just published would have until 2044 (assuming I renewed the copyright) to make me money. Then, the book transfers to the public domain for others to build on it. Very few works still make money after 28 years - and I'd wager most of the ones that still do (like Star Wars) partly keep making money because of new material being added.
However, over the years, copyright terms lengthened until now it's 70 years after the author's death. If I die at age 90, my novel will be protected by copyright until 2135. At that point, my youngest son (now 9) would be 128 - and likely deceased. If my youngest son had a child at 30, his child would be 98 when my copyright ran out. I don't need copyrights on my works lasting until my great-great-great grandchildren are born. That's not giving me incentive to create new works. 14 years + 14 years would be plenty.
If copyright law was reset back to 14 years plus an optional one-time 14 year extension, a lot of the problems with copyright would go away.
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
It's not a violation of your trademark to use your trademark to refer to your brand. Otherwise, every time anybody used any brand name it would be a trademark violation. Deception must be at least attempted for trademark violation to occur - that is, the violator must make some pretense that the usage is known to and endorsed by the owner of the trademark. Perhaps Samsung could argue that the use of their trademark might confuse people into thinking that this GTA mod was sanctioned or released by them. I think such an argument would at best get them laughed out of court and at worst get any lawyer Samsung sent disbarred and maybe jailed for contempt; but they could at least argue that.
Do *you* think anybody could have reasonably been confused by the use of these names in a GTA mod showing them being used as grenades? No? Neither would a judge or a jury.
Well not exactly, l the DMCA has a 7 step procedure that ends in a court battle. And is supposed to favor the accused until then.
I don't remember the steps exactly, but it's something like this:
Accuser files claim
Content removed
Accused contests claim
Content restored
Accuser reinstates claim
Content removed
Accused recontests claim
Content restored
Accuser is now supposed to file suit, and the outcome decides who owns the content and weather it remains up.
Problem is youtube only implements up to the 3rd step. (And sometimes even that is not available.) Basically they allow the first contestion, but do nothing about it, and your content remains down. This forces you to bear the burden of filing the lawsuit, and even if you win they make it difficult to get your content back up. Not exactly what the DMCA outlines, and favors the Accuser far more. This is also we whay makes it profitable to use it use bots to file claims. (If only it were illegal to implement it only partly)
Samsung is, for the moment ay least, a multi-billion dollar company with huge pockets. Win or lose the cost of this type of court case is a blip in their budget. However for the defendant the financial risk is huge: he could lose his life savings on a case like this.
Isn't Youtube the defendant here? Google could step in here.
Nope, as long as YouTube abides by the terms of the DMCA, they are shielded from liability. This means they must take down the video when they receive a copyright claim, but must reinstate the video if the author files a counter claim. At that point, Samsung's recourse would be to sue the author.
Lets say we do away with copyright tomorrow and all of my novels have that creator endorsed marking on them. The big question is whether the book buying public would even care. My novel sells for $7.99 (paperback). Suppose HarperCollins decides to publish an edition of my book without my approval. Thanks to copyright going away, there is no legal recourse for me to tell them to stop or to compensate me. Being a bigger publishing house, they might be able to undercut me on price. Now, my $7.99 paperback has to contend with their $4.99 paperback edition. Plus, they are able to get their version of my book into all the bookstores while mine is still limited in scope. (My book is only available from Amazon at the moment.)
The big question is: Would the buying public care that my book has the "Creator Endorsed" logo on it or would they flock to the cheaper copy to save some cash?
As much as I'd like to say people would go with Creator Endorsed, I think they'd go with the saved cash and I'd wind up losing sales. (This is the only time when I'd call "lost sales" an actual thing since the person actually bought a copy of the book but did so from someone who was selling their own version without getting approval/providing compensation.)
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
As an author, I think your message "we should take away copyright, because authors would keep on writing even if they got no money and no credit for it" to be, basically, utterly and completely despicable.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
Even in the case of very highly-paid CEOs though, the annual salary of that employee still won't sting a big corporation like Samsung very much. Now, make it 1% of their annual revenue, and then we're talking.
Personally though, I think the DMCA could be fairly easily reworked to put some parity between the parties into the system:
1) Forbid any automated, multiple, and/or electronic takedowns. Each takedown should be for a single alleged infraction, and delivered by registered mail, FedEx, or some other similarly-reliable delivery service that provides evidence of delivery.
2) Those claims of infringement need to be made by a single, identifiable, individual. It doesn't matter if that's the actual owner or their lawyer; so long as the claim can be traced back to that person claiming, under penalty of perjury, that the content is owned and infringing.
3) Give the "under penalty of perjury" part some teeth. If the content is not actually owned by the claimant, covered by fair use, or in any other way determined to be non-infringing; the individual from step 2 above goes to jail for perjury. I think a nice schedule would be:
1st false claim: 30 days in county.
2nd false claim: 90 days in county.
3rd false claim: 1 year in state, plus felony conviction on their criminal record and disbarment if the claimant is a lawyer.
Three simple steps. And I'd bet that we'd eliminate nearly all false and frivolous DMCA claims; but, more importantly, equalize the risk and power differential between the plaintiff and defendant.
Imagine all the people...
Seriously, this... very much this. I don't think I'd even go so far as 28 years though, or require anyone to go through the hassle of filing for the extension. I'd just go with a flat 20 years. For the life of me, I can't think of a single good reason that a copyright should last any longer than a patent.
Imagine all the people...
Then I suppose you ought to take your post down. After all, you uttered the phrases "Samsung" and "Note 7".
To be fair, Samsung did get sued for making a parody of the iPhone.
I don't think copyright is totally bad. For example, I recently published my first novel. Without copyright law, someone else could grab my novel and start printing/selling their own copies of it. I'd wind up competing with my own novel. Then there are issues of film studios being able to take anyone's work and make movies based off of it without compensating the author at all. I'd have to spend a lot of time and money filing lawsuits to make them stop and, without copyright law, I might not be successful.
That is a good point. Without copyright, not only would you compete against yourself when selling your own book, it would annihilate any control directly related follow on work -- movies, book sequels, etc.
Removal of copyright would have far reaching consequences to the entertainment industry and software industry. Many people here on slashdot think that software patents are mostly bad, and we should fall back on copyright. Well, gee, do we really want to categorically remove the concept of intellectual property?
3) Give the "under penalty of perjury" part some teeth. If the content is not actually owned by the claimant, covered by fair use, or in any other way determined to be non-infringing; the individual from step 2 above goes to jail for perjury. I think a nice schedule would be:
1st false claim: 30 days in county.
2nd false claim: 90 days in county.
3rd false claim: 1 year in state, plus felony conviction on their criminal record and disbarment if the claimant is a lawyer.
Those teeth are too sharp. You would swing the balance too far in the opposite direction, which would gut any industry that legitimately relies on digital copyrights having value. Conceptually, the DMCA is a necessary thing, and legitimate claims are beneficial to society at large. It just happens that it was written in an absurd way that allows incredible levels of abuse, and that needs to be fixed.
IMHO, either 1 or 2 that you suggest would effectively solve the problem, though I think it would be better if 1 were simply made more sensible, rather than removed completely. Not requiring automatic take downs would stop the lions share of false claims though, and requiring legitimate identification would make counter-claims much more effective.
If you really want to add teeth, provide a mechanism for determining an intentionally false claim, and make issuing one wire fraud. Then you get sensible criminal charges for intentional abuse of the system automatically.
Security is mostly a superstition... Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. - Helen Keller
The absurdly long duration of copyrights, from the Sonny Bono Copyright Extension act, is indeed absurd.
A good discussion, how can we fix copyright without telling artists that they don't own their own work, would be useful.
The fact that copyright law has problems, however, does not mean that it has no value and should be discarded entirely. Except on slashdot, where any problem whatsoever can only be seen in black or white, a complete dichotomy: if copyright law isn't perfect then it's useless, no other possibilities.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com