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from the sometimes-automation-doesn't-work dept.
The latest episode of Family Guy featured footage from the NES game Double Dribble, showing a glitch that allows a player to easily make three-point shots. The video was apparently copied directly from YouTube. TorrentFreak reports that the over seven-year-old original video has either been blocked by Fox using the DMCA or automatically blocked by the ContentID system:
Interestingly the clip that was uploaded by sw1tched was the exact same clip that appeared in the Family Guy episode on Sunday. So, unless Fox managed to duplicate the gameplay precisely, Fox must've taken the clip from YouTube. Whether Fox can do that and legally show the clip in an episode is a matter for the experts to argue but what followed next was patently absurd. Shortly after the Family Guy episode aired, Fox filed a complaint with YouTube and took down the Double Dribble video game clip on copyright grounds. (mirror Daily Motion)
Faced with yet another example of a blatantly wrongful takedown, TorrentFreak spoke with Fight for the Future CTO Jeff Lyon. Coincidentally he'd just watched the episode in question. "It's most likely that this is just another example of YouTube's Content ID system automatically taking down a video without regard to actual copyright ownership and fair use. As soon as FOX broadcast that Family Guy episode, their robots started taking down any footage that appeared to be reposted from the show — and in this case they took down the footage they stole from an independent creator," Lyon says.
YouTube's troubles with overzealously removing fair use content are well documented. It seems now that even original content isn't safe once the media industry gets a hold of it.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 21 2016, @06:47AM
Hey, let's completely ignore the tales that Disney got famous for, such as Snow White, Beauty and the Beast, and The Little Mermaid, are all folklore which shouldn't be copyright-able... And the damn statues are culturally worthless if they weren't borrowing heavily from the same well of cultural wealth.
The rich bastards take from the public domain, but fight so that nothing is ever payed back to it. They don't deserve the protections we pay for in terms of our courts and legislation. Copyrights are anti-Capitalism. You only own your actual work, not the likeness of its output. Want to make more money? Do more work. Hint: You can't "pirate" what work isn't done. Get payment up front, like a good art concession should, and we eliminate "piracy" and the need for copyright as well.
Fuck 'em all. Down with all copyright!
(Score: 2) by bitstream on Saturday May 21 2016, @09:23AM
What you describe is the behavior of criminals and crooks. Gives a new insight into the state of affairs.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Saturday May 21 2016, @07:30PM
Actually, while that's a bit problem, the answer isn't simple. There was a lot of original creative work in those Disney creations, and that should have been copyrightable for a reasonable period of time. Say 15-20 years. The problem is that with extended copyrights they have swamped the originals rather in the manner that Joan Baez swamped many traditional folksongs. You can't find the originals anymore without a LOT of effort, and if you were to make a work derivative of the originals, the holder of the copyright on the well-known work would sue you for infringement (well, takedown anyway). So no matter how good your new derivative work it, you can't compete.
The real answer is to limit copyright to 15-20 years, and to be VERY strict about claims that works are derivative. But no jury and most judges won't understand what derivative from the original means when they have the popular work floating in their mind.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 2) by Pino P on Sunday May 22 2016, @03:36PM
You can't find the originals anymore without a LOT of effort
Usually Gutenberg.org or Wikisource.org will have the pre-1923 version of a fairy tale. How is typing little mermaid or pinocchio into one of these sites' search engines "a LOT of effort"?
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Sunday May 22 2016, @06:43PM
If you want to read the story to your kids, you need a book. Maybe an e-book could be made to work, but I have my doubts. It's much better if it's something that you could trust your kids to hold, and most e-books are considerably more fragile than a book. And it's really much better if you can both see it at the same time. Which means a larger format that most e-books.
We're talking here about literature directed at kids, but which must be read by grown-ups. And attractive visuals *are* important. They shouldn't need to be particular visuals, in fact needing to be particular visuals is limiting, and artificially constraining the concepts of beauty, hansome, etc. in a way that I feel is harmful. But bright colors and clear lines are extremely useful.
So Gutenberg is not ideal for this audience. Not unless you can print, bind, and clean-up illustrations yourself. For adults it's quite good, and the only problem I have with it is the limited subject matter, which isn't their fault...and which they are remedying as fast as they can. (Well, not the only problem. Even for adults I find e-books to be far inferior to print. They're generally even inferior to static html pages, which you can also get from Gutenberg, but which don't approach printed books in utility and reading pleasure.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.