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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at The Verge's sister publication Vox.com), says that when he learned about the decision, he asked that the strike be rescinded, leading to the videos being reinstated.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."
are well protected under Copyright Law. This is not a problem of Copyright Law. This is a problem with the Youtube 3 Strikes rule. If youtube is not going to do legal reviews of takedown notices and instead depend on crowd's intelligence that is Youtube's choice but then it should not use a 3 strikes rule on such takedown notices which have not gone through proper review.
**Life is too short to be serious**
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)?
Basically nothing. The idiots that wrote the law never stopped to consider how badly it would be abused. In this case the people involved were lucky to be famous enough that they could get anyone to care. Unless you're already a big name on YouTube, good luck ever reaching a human being at Google regardless of problem.
At least The Verge will be rightly pilloried over this. I don't know if it will affect their readership though. I quit going to their site shortly after it launched because it was a bloated pile of shit that was utter hell on my slightly old hardware at the time. When will tech press realize that they just need a decent simple layout that doesn't distract from their actual content?
I remember Patel from Engadget back in the day. He has a law degree and should know better than to make such an asinine comment about this being anywhere close to copyright infringement.
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 original video is quite hilarious. He gets wrong almost everything that you can get wrong, and also some things you'd think you can't get wrong! He doesn't even know how to call things, like zip ties are "tweezers" and he calls various things (including the I/O shield) as "braces", the CPU socket a "holder" etc. The serious mistakes are applying a shitload of thermal paste *in addition* to the thermal pad the cooler had, installing the RAM in the wrong slots (non-dual channel), installing the PSU the wrong way, screwing the case radiator in without its fans...
For me the most hilarious parts are two:
- He wears some rubber band (unconnected to anything) on his arm to protect himself from static electricity (!).
- He goes on and on describing how he will use a "CPU applicator" to make it easy to "apply" the CPU, then, without saying anything, it is clear he's thrown it to the side and just drops the CPU in the socket as he should.
The second of the linked parody videos is quite funny too.
Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent. Polar Scope Align for iOS
So Yourtube, when will there be a strike system for false flagging? Youtube can't ignore the false claims or they'd lose safe harbor, but they can surely strike the flaggers Youtube account. i.e. flag and suspend VOX on Youtube for the fraudulent flags.
When will Youtube flag & suspend the Youtube accounts of companies making false DMCA claims? In this case, why wasn't the VOX Youtube account suspended as well?!?!?