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Vox Lawyers Briefly Censored YouTubers Who Mocked the Verge's Bad PC Build Video (arstechnica.com)
An anonymous reader writes: In case you missed the latest drama to take place in the YouTube tech community, Ars Technica reports how Vox Media attempted to copyright strike two reaction videos that mocked The Verge's terrible PC build guide video that could have ruined a $2,000 system for a beginner PC builder. That effort failed when the tech community sounded the alarms; YouTube removed the copyright strikes and Vox Media had to retract their takedown notice.
From the report: "Last week, The Verge got a reminder about the power of the Streisand effect after its lawyers issued copyright takedown requests for two YouTube videos that criticized -- and heavily excerpted -- a video by The Verge. Each takedown came with a copyright 'strike.' It was a big deal for the creators of the videos, because three 'strikes' in a 90-day period are enough to get a YouTuber permanently banned from the platform. T.C. Sottek, the Verge's managing editor, blamed lawyers at the Verge's parent company, Vox Media, for the decision. 'The Verge's editorial structure was involved zero percent in the decision to issue a strike,' Sottek said in a direct message. 'Vox Media's legal team did this independently and informed us of it after the fact.' The move sparked an online backlash. Verge editor Nilay Patel (who, full disclosure, was briefly a colleague of mine at The Verge's sister publication Vox.com), says that when he learned about the decision, he asked that the strike be rescinded, leading to the videos being reinstated. Still, Patel defended the lawyers' legal reasoning, arguing that the videos 'crossed the line' into copyright infringement. It's hard to be sure if this is true since there are very few precedents in this area of the law. But the one legal precedent I was able to find suggests the opposite: that this kind of video is solidly within the bounds of copyright's fair use doctrine."
From the report: "Last week, The Verge got a reminder about the power of the Streisand effect after its lawyers issued copyright takedown requests for two YouTube videos that criticized -- and heavily excerpted -- a video by The Verge. Each takedown came with a copyright 'strike.' It was a big deal for the creators of the videos, because three 'strikes' in a 90-day period are enough to get a YouTuber permanently banned from the platform. T.C. Sottek, the Verge's managing editor, blamed lawyers at the Verge's parent company, Vox Media, for the decision. 'The Verge's editorial structure was involved zero percent in the decision to issue a strike,' Sottek said in a direct message. 'Vox Media's legal team did this independently and informed us of it after the fact.' The move sparked an online backlash. Verge editor Nilay Patel (who, full disclosure, was briefly a colleague of mine at The Verge's sister publication Vox.com), says that when he learned about the decision, he asked that the strike be rescinded, leading to the videos being reinstated. Still, Patel defended the lawyers' legal reasoning, arguing that the videos 'crossed the line' into copyright infringement. It's hard to be sure if this is true since there are very few precedents in this area of the law. But the one legal precedent I was able to find suggests the opposite: that this kind of video is solidly within the bounds of copyright's fair use doctrine."
I would assume then that there's a corollary policy, where a YouTuber who gets three takedown notices rescinded in a 90-day period is also permanently banned from the platform (or at least permanently banned from issuing takedown notices)?
Lawyers abused DCMA/Copyright, company initially complies, people notice it's not legit and complain, company then investigates and fixes it. The system works, that's still 99%+ uptime. Not even a bad outcome.
But it's still a bad system -- it was a Verge editor that asked for the strike to be rescinded -- if not for that (which was surely only due to perceived bad publicity), then what would have happened?
Shaming DMCA abusers into backing down doesn't sound like a reasonable policy.
Yet again, YouTube demonstrates the sort of behavior that could never be tolerated if it weren't for having Alphabet as their sugar daddy. Say what you will about the general desire a lot of folks have to use antitrust laws to bust up Silicon Valley's darlings, but YouTube is one incredibly good argument for wielding it against Alphabet. Why? A few reasons:
1. They continue to operate at a loss.
2. Alphabet continues to tolerate their amateurish ways of dealing with ToS that pisses off folks at every turn--including gaming their premium content producers.
3. Their content regulation is a total amateur hour shit show that a for-profit company accountable to shareholders could never put up with.
4. Serious competitors struggle to gain ground because they're essentially treated as a loss leader by Google with access to Google's infrastructure and cash to subsidize them.
If they had been bought by Microsoft to join with Bing, a lot of their defenders would be railing at how Microsoft is crippling the market with that crap.
The greatness of this parody requires that it be unintentional.
Fortunately for everyone else, it was.
Now, consider that these people also work on other "news" stories. This is their career!
Still wonder why the claims of fake news has so much traction? Nitwits like these are everywhere in "journalism," where it is clear that not only are a few particular topics problematic for them, but in fact that all topics are problematic for them.
"His name was James Damore."
Other problem is sometimes that system is abused and most people that have videos removed don't get this kinda PR that ends up helping them. A lot of videos that get removed lose a lot of views and never recover from it.
You are forgetting to add the real toxic shit with this whole thing, which was Vox tried to claim making fun of the video is racist because apparently a black guy royally fucking up a PC build cannot be made fun of cuz black.
Anybody who has actually seen the video can tell ya this wasn't just "Oh he put in a fan wrong", this guy had NO CLUE what he was doing and if you would have followed his instructions? You most likely would have burned up your PC, yes its THAT badly done. And it just shows how sad and pathetic the USA is becoming when a major corp can scream "Thats raciss!" over someone making fun of what was so damn obviously a dumbass that has no idea what they are doing trying to give instructions, I mean good lord it was as bad as that gun safety vid where the cop shot himself in the foot, but the media has by and large kept their mouth shut over Vox throwing the race card.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
sarcasm Apparently 40+ errors are "minor factual errors". LUL.
An imagur link to basically a chunk of text in rendered with a small font into a bitmap. Ugh WTF is wrong with people? Can we dial back the outrage on this story so can have some REAL nerdrage over the offence that is that link? It's barbaric.
SJW n. One who posts facts.