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posted by CoolHand on Sunday August 23 2015, @08:47AM   Printer-friendly
from the make-em-play-fair dept.

Accused public records terrorist, Carl Malamud recently suffered a "copyright strike" by WGBH of Boston for a public domain, government produced video he had posted to Youtube. Youtube's policy is that if a user gets a copyright strike, his account is crippled and if he gets more than a handful, his account is disabled.

Malamud thinks that what's good for the goose should be good for the gander and that any account filing erroneous copyright strikes, aka copyright fouls, should have reciprocal consequences. Since these copyright strikes are Youtube policy, not legal requirements, Youtube would be completely within their rights to implement a system of copyright fouls too.

Rogue archivist Carl Malamud writes, "I got mugged by a bunch of Boston hooligans. Readers of Boing Boing may be familiar with my FedFlix project which has resulted in 6,000 government videos getting posted to YouTube and the Internet Archive."

One of the films the government sent me to post is Energy - The American Experience, a 1976 film created by the Department of Energy (YouTube, the Internet Archive).

Well, somebody at WGBH saw the words "American Experience" in the title and went through the laborous process of issuing a formal Copyright Strike on YouTube. This is no casual process, they had to swear on a stack of affidavits that this really, really is their video. As a result, my account got a strike, I had to endure the humiliation that is "copyright school," and my account has many features disabled.


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  • (Score: -1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 23 2015, @08:59AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 23 2015, @08:59AM (#226612)

    So it has come to this. Some guy sets up shop in the virtual company town of YouTube and now he's bitching and moaning about company policy enforcers enforcing company policy. I might actually give a shit if YouTube were the only company town for video hosting, which it isn't. And you know what, you don't even need to put your videos on any video hosting service either. You can escape the company town and go set up a fucking web server and serve fucking videos without fucking permission from fucking YouTube. You know? Fucking stupid whiny asshole.

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  • (Score: 0, Disagree) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 23 2015, @09:03AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 23 2015, @09:03AM (#226615)

    Mod down! because everybody uses YouTube for video! because it's YouTube! and YouTube means it's video! No Copyright Intended.

    • (Score: 2) by WizardFusion on Monday August 24 2015, @09:28AM

      by WizardFusion (498) Subscriber Badge on Monday August 24 2015, @09:28AM (#226946) Journal

      No, you are wrong. Google is not the only search engine, yet everyone thinks it is, just like YouTube is not the only video site.
      They are big and they are popular, it does not make them the only one.

  • (Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 23 2015, @09:06AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 23 2015, @09:06AM (#226616)

    Someone broke the law by falsely claiming copyright on the video. If the videos are posted on both YouTube and Internet Archive, this can be used to help burn down the company town's flawed policy.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 23 2015, @09:13AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 23 2015, @09:13AM (#226619)

      Broke the law? Are we going to pretend that copyright is a criminal matter, now? No Copyright Intended.

      If the videos are posted on both YouTube and the Internet Archive, why does it matter so much whether YouTube hosts them? No Copyright Intended.

      Is this Carl fellow some kind of egotist who needs to be seen by the young hip trendy kids who think YouTube is the hot hangout and the Internet Archive is the dull boring library? No Copyright Intended.

      • (Score: 4, Informative) by Nollij on Sunday August 23 2015, @01:45PM

        by Nollij (4559) on Sunday August 23 2015, @01:45PM (#226657)

        The DMCA is law, and I'm sure it was a DMCA notice.
        Those notices require the complainant to swear, under penalty of perjury, that they are acting in good faith, and authorized to take this action.
        Perjury is also a criminal offense.

        • (Score: 2) by Whoever on Sunday August 23 2015, @04:50PM

          by Whoever (4524) on Sunday August 23 2015, @04:50PM (#226683) Journal

          Those notices require the complainant to swear, under penalty of perjury, that they are acting in good faith, and authorized to take this action.

          No, the DMCA doesn't require this. Take a look at the actual text of the DMCA some time.

        • (Score: 4, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 23 2015, @06:07PM

          by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 23 2015, @06:07PM (#226695)

          No, what's required under penalty of perjury is that you don't pretend to be Disney when you're not. Pretending to own copy protection privileges that you don't own is no big deal, especially when compared to the punishment of infringement or a service provider not responding to a DMCA notice. This is why Youtube has a three strikes program but not a foul system for false takedowns. Under the current legal environment it's cheaper to ban repeat infringers than to keep policing their content and taking them down repeatedly but to ignore a takedown request could be disastrous for Youtube. This is why it's not YouTube's fault and simply going to another provider is not the solution. This is a problem with our legal system that applies to all service providers. While a three strikes system maybe optional it is encouraged by our legal system because our legal system makes alternatives much more expensive.

        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 25 2015, @06:32AM

          by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 25 2015, @06:32AM (#227429)

          > The DMCA is law, and I'm sure it was a DMCA notice.

          You are probably wrong.

          Youtube has implemented its own takedown system that doesn't involve DMCA. Its like they tried to make it even easier for large media organizations - they get an account with a special reporting system that lets them report videos without even having to do a DMCA form letter.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 23 2015, @09:11AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 23 2015, @09:11AM (#226618)

    it is really hard to set up an web/ftp/gopher server locally or rent one colocated somewhere and use that ._.

    youtube is free, but as long as people take TOS seriously... you get what you pay for!

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 23 2015, @09:15AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 23 2015, @09:15AM (#226620)

      Really hard to set up a web server?! Now I know you're lying. Go on, tell me the cloud doesn't exist either. Liar.

  • (Score: 4, Insightful) by Runaway1956 on Sunday August 23 2015, @09:16AM

    by Runaway1956 (2926) Subscriber Badge on Sunday August 23 2015, @09:16AM (#226621) Journal

    The question seems to be, "Is Youtube right"? Similar questions are popping up all over this country. "Are the cops always right?" "Is the court system just?" "Does Monsanto have the right to dictate which seeds can be used in farming?" "Is genetic engineering right?" "Are vaccination requirements just?"

    I don't care if it's Amazon, Google, Microsoft, or Anonymous Coward's Internet services - customers have the right to question you. If enough customers decide that you're being an ass, and that your practices are unjust, they're going to abandon ship in numbers that you can't recover from.

    You are right to point out that Youtube has alternatives, but right now, today, Youtube really is THE video hosting service on earth. I doubt that there is an internet using person on this planet who has never visited Youtube. Those other services? Mehhh - stop some random person on the street corner, and ask them where they go to watch videos, and the first word they utter will be Youtube. Keep prompting him, he might name one or two others.

    • (Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 23 2015, @09:22AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 23 2015, @09:22AM (#226623)

      Let's all read Slashdot, the site for news. It's not just a news site, it's the only site. If it's not Slashdot, it's not news.

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 23 2015, @01:04PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 23 2015, @01:04PM (#226652)

        I would but they seem to take weekends off, so no new stories on Saturday or Sunday, so I have to come here to troll, oops, I mean read new stories.

    • (Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 23 2015, @03:52PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 23 2015, @03:52PM (#226671)

      > stop some random person on the street corner, and ask them where they go to watch videos, and the first word they utter will be Youtube.

      I've been thinking about how to 'take back' the internet from all these centralized systems and I think I've come up with a good idea - steal their customers.

      First, this is predicated on the existence of a P2P system that is good enough to replace the various services. Assume we've already got that.

      Imagine if the client for this P2P network was smart enough to intercept every post to facebook, youtube, twitter, reddit, instagram, etc and mirrors it into the P2P system. It still goes through to the centralized service but it also makes a copy and posts that in the user's P2P network which is seeded from their phone and/or PC. Then the client is also smart enough so that when you go to view one of those centralized services it knows to try the P2P network first, only falling back to the centralized service when there are no available seeds.

      I'm thinking that a P2P client like that could invisibly usurp a lot of centralized users and avoid the network effect inertia phenomenon. I'm sure the big corps would do everything they could to keep it out of the app stores. So it might need to be something where the base P2P client does not know how to mirror content, but downloadable scripts can enable it for specific services.

    • (Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 23 2015, @10:31PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 23 2015, @10:31PM (#226739)

      We could just get rid of the DMCA for now. Youtube would be less inclined to allow random idiots to censor videos without any due process involved if the government wasn't pointing a gun at their head (i.e. threatening to take away safe harbor).

  • (Score: 2) by davester666 on Sunday August 23 2015, @06:19PM

    by davester666 (155) on Sunday August 23 2015, @06:19PM (#226699)

    Welcome to corporate dystopia, where the law is what is agreed to between large multinational corporations.