Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

SoylentNews is people

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.


Original Submission

 
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
Display Options Threshold/Breakthrough Mark All as Read Mark All as Unread
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
  • (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.

    Starting Score:    1  point
    Moderation   +2  
       Insightful=2, Total=2
    Extra 'Insightful' Modifier   0  
    Karma-Bonus Modifier   +1  

    Total Score:   4  
  • (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).