That's what I gather it's about, but don't consider me reliable. Actual information is next to nonexistant, because Universial isn't talking - they've claimed the video infringes on their copyright, but havn't elaborated beyond that, so this is all based on speculation. I would imagine that right now they are discussing it internally in the legal department.
True. Almost. Actually, you don't have to worry too much about choosing the right codec - you still have to offer at least two video files, but video-tag capable browsers are capable enough to pick a format they support if you offer a list. That means all you need to worry about is resolution. I've been having trouble getting WebM to work quite right so far (It's still a young format), so my own videos are currently Theora/Ogg/Ogg. Firefox plays them fine. You can see the progress-so-far at http://birds-are-nice.me/video/ - but I've got a long way to go yet before it's ready to link with the site proper, not even done a layout yet and only got two test-videos up.
I think a greater problem is going to be getting traffic. Youtube isn't just a video hosting service - its recormendation engine is a powerful feature in itsself, and can serve as the means by which a very obscure producer gains recognition. Without such an engine, they may just languish in obscurity.
In the positive though, no youtube comments. I am not the only one to notice the strange effect: Youtube comments are overwhelmingly dumb. Not even just a little dumb, like blog comments often are, but some of the greatest concentration of stupid on the internet. I don't know quite how this happened.
How are we supposed to watch the video again, after Universial had it pulled? Your claim does have much plausibility - I too find it unlikely so many major artists would endorse Megaupload - but it can't be proven either way without looking at the video. Which, amusingly, is now only accessible by going to pirate websites to download it.
The self-hosting part just got a lot easier with HTML5. I've recently had to switch my own videos from youtube to my own site, after it's content identifier decided that Gertie the Dinosaur (Produced in 1914, creator dead more than 70 years) is still under copyright.
A boycott is an interesting proposal, but with a fatal flaw: It's an extreme minority issue. Right now there are probably more people campaigning for shops to say 'Merry Christmas' than there are willing to join any kind of music boycott.
At a guess, the notices would be ignored entirely. In theory that opens the sites up for being sued if the claim is valid, but that would be prohibatively expensive and they know it.
... and which point you have to go through the costly litigation. The problem we keep running into is just one inherent in the legal system: It can easily get so time-consuming and expensive doing anything that smaller corporations and individuals just can't afford to play that game.
Same as always. Fair use is a perfectly valid defence, providing you are willing to spend a huge pile of money hireing lawyers and going to court over it. That's just how it usually works with the legal system: People have as many rights as they can afford to defend, and no more.
It's disputed. The artists in the video are contracted to Universial. The dispute appears to be over a standard clause in recording contracts that transfers copyright for everything the artist produces to the label for the term of the contract. It's intended to prevent another label poaching artists after they become famous.
And Brazil would probably charge Britain of bio-piracy for stealing their very profitable rubber trees and setting up our own plantations. Everyone takes ideas from everyone.
For civil action, they don't need the 'proof beyond reasonable doubt' standard familiar from criminal cases. An IP address will suffice, unless the defendant can provide some solid evidence to the contary .
You must remember that rights can conflict. There are times when the rights of one person are in conflict with those of another, and at that time some form of compromise is unavoidable. Shooting someone dead - even a criminal of obvious guilt - is still an execution without trial.... and that's in the event that it really is self defence. There is another approach: Let the mugger run off with the wallet, then focus on catching them through policing, giving them their fair trial and due process of law, and then throwing them in jail or some other sentence proportionate to the crime.
Liberal, conservative... those terms are so twisted around, does anyone even know what they mean any more? Because whatever they once meant, they don't now.
The internet isn't unified. Remember that most people consider the internet a place to keep track of friends on Facebook and look at pictures of cats. They care as little as possible about the politics behind it.
"apart from create something akin to China's "Great Firewall"."
I think that is the general idea. SOPA isn't so technologically sophisticated, but it's blocking provisions are the type of foundation a Great Firewall would need to be built upon.
When it comes to law though, the borders are more physical. Even up in the Cloud, information has to be stored in an actual hard drive somewhere. Users have a country of residence. The big distinction is the ease of jurisdiction-shopping. If you don't like the laws of your real country, it's a huge hastle and expense to leave and go elsewhere - while on the internet, it isn't hard at all to do the equivilent.
There are some completly lawless places, like Freenet - but this isn't for an legal reason, but simply because they have been designed in such a way as to make laws prohibatively difficult or outright impossible to enforce.
That's trivial to work around. All that need be done is point out that even if a site is hosted outside the US and created by non-US citizens there, then when someone in the US accesses it they are still subject to US law. Thus the SOPA censorship program is only to prevent people from sneakily using the national border to commit crimes on the inside of it.
Decision reached:
- All my videos are now deleted from Youtube, and account closed.
- I shall recheck them, just to make sure they are truely public domain and don't have any more nasty surprises awaiting.
- Then they all go up on my own website. That also means I get to play with HTML5 video, so soon I'll be ranting about patents instead and the need to store every video twice with different codecs to ensure it'll play.
So all I need to do is tell youtube that... oh, I tried that last time. They never responded. I doubt they even have anyone read them. The problem here isn't arguing over some detail of what is copyrighted and what isn't. The problem is that youtube, as per standard cover-your-ass procedure, treat any claim of copyright as immediatly valid no matter how dubious and ignore any evidence otherwise. That makes perfect sense from their perspective: It is better that a thousand videos be falsely blocked than a single one be kept up after notification and expose youtube to legal action.
In the case of this particular video, it's a textbook case of the subject of this article. A public domain work over which copyright is still being claimed, because there is no penalty for falsely claiming copyright over anything in the public domain and the legal situation favors those with deep pockets and lawyers on retainer.
Gertie was one of the first restorations I ever did, and I still consider it one of the best. It isn't actually the one you linked to at LoC though - that is Gertie on Tour, a sequal (ie, published after) the one I did.
I think I'll throw the file up on some searchable p2p networks. It isn't as convenient as youtube, certainly, and not accessible to wide an audience... but at least it'll be free, in some sense.
Coincidentially, I just had exactly the same happen to me. I researched it, and it turns out that it may be correct. The video was Gertie the Dinosaur, the creator of which died 77 years ago, so it's well and truely PD... but the music - original score, composed specifically for that video back when it was released - was composed by someone else who managed to live right up until 1980. So that doesn't expire until 2030.
Gertie is the first animated cartoon character ever. The very first character. There is no history of animated cartoons before Gertie. And even this historical very first ever cartoon is still, in audio at least, copyrighted.
With youtube also failing to respond to my disputing another (unrelated) DMCA notice after a period of some *months*, I've decided to just pull everything I uploaded in protest. As far as I can tell, that one was actually sent deliberatly because I used 48 seconds of video (mostly without even audio) from a 22-minute TV episode in a work of clear parody poking fun at some of the unintentionally campy scenes.
Slashdot Mirror
That's what I gather it's about, but don't consider me reliable. Actual information is next to nonexistant, because Universial isn't talking - they've claimed the video infringes on their copyright, but havn't elaborated beyond that, so this is all based on speculation. I would imagine that right now they are discussing it internally in the legal department.
True. Almost. Actually, you don't have to worry too much about choosing the right codec - you still have to offer at least two video files, but video-tag capable browsers are capable enough to pick a format they support if you offer a list. That means all you need to worry about is resolution. I've been having trouble getting WebM to work quite right so far (It's still a young format), so my own videos are currently Theora/Ogg/Ogg. Firefox plays them fine. You can see the progress-so-far at http://birds-are-nice.me/video/ - but I've got a long way to go yet before it's ready to link with the site proper, not even done a layout yet and only got two test-videos up.
I think a greater problem is going to be getting traffic. Youtube isn't just a video hosting service - its recormendation engine is a powerful feature in itsself, and can serve as the means by which a very obscure producer gains recognition. Without such an engine, they may just languish in obscurity.
In the positive though, no youtube comments. I am not the only one to notice the strange effect: Youtube comments are overwhelmingly dumb. Not even just a little dumb, like blog comments often are, but some of the greatest concentration of stupid on the internet. I don't know quite how this happened.
How are we supposed to watch the video again, after Universial had it pulled? Your claim does have much plausibility - I too find it unlikely so many major artists would endorse Megaupload - but it can't be proven either way without looking at the video. Which, amusingly, is now only accessible by going to pirate websites to download it.
The self-hosting part just got a lot easier with HTML5. I've recently had to switch my own videos from youtube to my own site, after it's content identifier decided that Gertie the Dinosaur (Produced in 1914, creator dead more than 70 years) is still under copyright.
A boycott is an interesting proposal, but with a fatal flaw: It's an extreme minority issue. Right now there are probably more people campaigning for shops to say 'Merry Christmas' than there are willing to join any kind of music boycott.
At a guess, the notices would be ignored entirely. In theory that opens the sites up for being sued if the claim is valid, but that would be prohibatively expensive and they know it.
... and which point you have to go through the costly litigation. The problem we keep running into is just one inherent in the legal system: It can easily get so time-consuming and expensive doing anything that smaller corporations and individuals just can't afford to play that game.
Same as always. Fair use is a perfectly valid defence, providing you are willing to spend a huge pile of money hireing lawyers and going to court over it. That's just how it usually works with the legal system: People have as many rights as they can afford to defend, and no more.
It's disputed. The artists in the video are contracted to Universial. The dispute appears to be over a standard clause in recording contracts that transfers copyright for everything the artist produces to the label for the term of the contract. It's intended to prevent another label poaching artists after they become famous.
Fair use is a defence: The burden is on the defendant to prove fair use.
Aside from competing for the high score so they could enter BUM.
And Brazil would probably charge Britain of bio-piracy for stealing their very profitable rubber trees and setting up our own plantations. Everyone takes ideas from everyone.
For civil action, they don't need the 'proof beyond reasonable doubt' standard familiar from criminal cases. An IP address will suffice, unless the defendant can provide some solid evidence to the contary .
Cochlear implants can't match the capabilities of a normal, undamaged ear - but they are good enough to make out speech. Mostly.
You must remember that rights can conflict. There are times when the rights of one person are in conflict with those of another, and at that time some form of compromise is unavoidable. Shooting someone dead - even a criminal of obvious guilt - is still an execution without trial.... and that's in the event that it really is self defence. There is another approach: Let the mugger run off with the wallet, then focus on catching them through policing, giving them their fair trial and due process of law, and then throwing them in jail or some other sentence proportionate to the crime.
The 'they' I refered to in the second sentence was not the site, but the person accessing it.
Liberal, conservative... those terms are so twisted around, does anyone even know what they mean any more? Because whatever they once meant, they don't now.
Not everyone considers the right to carry lethal weapons so sacred.
The internet isn't unified. Remember that most people consider the internet a place to keep track of friends on Facebook and look at pictures of cats. They care as little as possible about the politics behind it.
"apart from create something akin to China's "Great Firewall"."
I think that is the general idea. SOPA isn't so technologically sophisticated, but it's blocking provisions are the type of foundation a Great Firewall would need to be built upon.
When it comes to law though, the borders are more physical. Even up in the Cloud, information has to be stored in an actual hard drive somewhere. Users have a country of residence. The big distinction is the ease of jurisdiction-shopping. If you don't like the laws of your real country, it's a huge hastle and expense to leave and go elsewhere - while on the internet, it isn't hard at all to do the equivilent.
There are some completly lawless places, like Freenet - but this isn't for an legal reason, but simply because they have been designed in such a way as to make laws prohibatively difficult or outright impossible to enforce.
That's trivial to work around. All that need be done is point out that even if a site is hosted outside the US and created by non-US citizens there, then when someone in the US accesses it they are still subject to US law. Thus the SOPA censorship program is only to prevent people from sneakily using the national border to commit crimes on the inside of it.
Decision reached:
- All my videos are now deleted from Youtube, and account closed.
- I shall recheck them, just to make sure they are truely public domain and don't have any more nasty surprises awaiting.
- Then they all go up on my own website. That also means I get to play with HTML5 video, so soon I'll be ranting about patents instead and the need to store every video twice with different codecs to ensure it'll play.
So all I need to do is tell youtube that... oh, I tried that last time. They never responded. I doubt they even have anyone read them. The problem here isn't arguing over some detail of what is copyrighted and what isn't. The problem is that youtube, as per standard cover-your-ass procedure, treat any claim of copyright as immediatly valid no matter how dubious and ignore any evidence otherwise. That makes perfect sense from their perspective: It is better that a thousand videos be falsely blocked than a single one be kept up after notification and expose youtube to legal action.
In the case of this particular video, it's a textbook case of the subject of this article. A public domain work over which copyright is still being claimed, because there is no penalty for falsely claiming copyright over anything in the public domain and the legal situation favors those with deep pockets and lawyers on retainer.
Gertie was one of the first restorations I ever did, and I still consider it one of the best. It isn't actually the one you linked to at LoC though - that is Gertie on Tour, a sequal (ie, published after) the one I did.
I think I'll throw the file up on some searchable p2p networks. It isn't as convenient as youtube, certainly, and not accessible to wide an audience... but at least it'll be free, in some sense.
Coincidentially, I just had exactly the same happen to me. I researched it, and it turns out that it may be correct. The video was Gertie the Dinosaur, the creator of which died 77 years ago, so it's well and truely PD... but the music - original score, composed specifically for that video back when it was released - was composed by someone else who managed to live right up until 1980. So that doesn't expire until 2030.
Gertie is the first animated cartoon character ever. The very first character. There is no history of animated cartoons before Gertie. And even this historical very first ever cartoon is still, in audio at least, copyrighted.
With youtube also failing to respond to my disputing another (unrelated) DMCA notice after a period of some *months*, I've decided to just pull everything I uploaded in protest. As far as I can tell, that one was actually sent deliberatly because I used 48 seconds of video (mostly without even audio) from a 22-minute TV episode in a work of clear parody poking fun at some of the unintentionally campy scenes.