Corporate Claims On Public Domain YouTube Videos 320
esocid writes "Cory Doctorow has written a Guardian column, 'The pirates of YouTube,' about how multinational copyright-holding companies have laid false claim to public domain videos on YouTube. The videos are posted by the nonprofit FedFlix organization, which liberates public domain government-produced videos and makes them available to the world. These videos were produced at public expense and no one can claim to own them, but multinationals from CBS to Discovery Communications have done just that, getting YouTube to place ads on the video that deliver income to their coffers. What's more, their false copyright claims could lead to the suspension of FedFlix's YouTube account under Google's rules for its copyright policing system. This system, ContentID, sets out penalties for 'repeat offenders' who generate too many copyright claims — but offers no corresponding penalties for rightsholders who make too many false claims of ownership."
This just in: DMCA is unfair and ContentID sucks (Score:5, Informative)
Counter-notices are an invitation to sue and ContentID suffers from a horrendous number of false-positives. Good luck fighting a GEMA claim by the way (they claim everything, even if the artist in question isn't a member).
Re:This just in: DMCA is unfair and ContentID suck (Score:5, Informative)
Seriously, fuck GEMA.
Their practices are harmful to themselves, the artists they claim to represent and the users. While other, similar organizations may have been late to the whole internet thing and still don't get it GEMA acts like it doesn't even exist as a media platform or something.
Again, fuck GEMA.
Preservation of the public domain and the commons (Score:5, Informative)
If you are short of some good Christmas reading, you could do a lot worse than James Boyle's excellent book, "The Public Domain." It looks at a number of similar issues, critiquing the rise in the enclosure of the public domain, with the call to arms that, without defenders actively arguing in favour of the public domain, it will be gradually eroded by the proprietary claims of third parties, since it has no voice, nor lobbying power, of its own.
He has made it available [thepublicdomain.org] in PDF under (CC) BY-NC-SA 3.0 [creativecommons.org], so you can "try before you buy" or else not buy it if you do not want to but, in my opinion, it's worth every penny. (Although I feel rather stupid having a hard copy sitting untouched on my shelf, just so James and his publishers receive money, when the electronic copy was worth far more to me!)
David Bollier's "Public Assets, Private Profits [indiana.edu]" (sorry - Google link) is definitely worth reading, too, for those who care about the preservation of the commons.
That's a criminal offense (Score:5, Informative)
That's a criminal offense. See 17 USC 506(c) [justice.gov]: "Fraudulent Copyright Notice. -- Any person who, with fraudulent intent, places on any article a notice of copyright or words of the same purport that such person knows to be false, or who, with fraudulent intent, publicly distributes or imports for public distribution any article bearing such notice or words that such person knows to be false, shall be fined not more than $2,500. "
The Department of Justice is squishy-soft on enforcing this. It's apparently never been enforced. Nor does it create a private right of action, so you can't sue under it.
GEMA (Score:3, Informative)
Yeah, there are all sorts of copyright pirates out there.
GEMA is an example [youtube.com] of an organization that lays millions of fraudulent claims.
Trolling is another problem (Score:5, Informative)
Another issue with this system is that it's easily trolled. There's people who put false claims in claiming to be a company when they're really not associated with the company at all.
It's a common problem with My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic videos on Youtube. Hasbro (the owner) allows them to be up, including full episodes. Someone else claims to be Hasbro and has it pulled, then the poster has to go to real Hasbro to get them to tell Youtube to reverse it. Eventually the account gets "flagged" for repeated violations even though they've all been false positives.
The system just plain sucks at handling this stuff.
Re:That's a criminal offense (Score:3, Informative)
It's tricky to prove. The defence of an honest mistake is way too plausible for this to stick. A legal strategy that's a lot more likely to succeed is a civil lawsuit, where the standards of proof are much lower, and you can still claim damages (just less) if you can't prove they acted wilfully.
Re:Wait a minute... (Score:5, Informative)
If its truly frivilous, the judge can decide that hes had enough of the shenanigans, award attorney fees (which in a drawn out fight can be quite high), throw in contempt of court damages, etc. It can also open the door for countersuing for "SLAPP" tactics, and a lawyer who does this too much can be disbarred.
Our system allows a lot of crap through, but you really dont want to piss the judges off with trivial crap no matter who you are, because they can hit back very hard.
Re:YouTube is not an archive (Score:5, Informative)
Why put this stuff on YouTube at all? Why not post it to the Internet Archive and other archival sites?
(Of course, false copyright claims should be prosecuted as fraudulent and punished accordingly.)
The stuff is already archived before FedFlix does anything. FedFlix is seeking to make these more available, that is, "share" them. Which is what YouTube is for. It's even in the Summary: "The videos are posted by the nonprofit FedFlix organization, which liberates public domain government-produced videos and makes them available to the world.".
And according to TFA: "Malamud's group pays the fees associated with retrieving copies from the US government ... and posts them to YouTube, the Internet Archive and other video sites."
Re:Wait a minute... (Score:5, Informative)
It actually is abuse. The law's explicit. You HAVE to have rights to the content claimed to make a filing or commit an act of Perjury. "Fingerprint" analysis is insufficient in most cases to pin down the requirement- your instance is proof enough of that. Doesn't matter if you can challenge it or not- it's about the fact that you're having to do it in the first place .
Re:happened to me, but YouTube is part of solution (Score:5, Informative)
I'm glad you've had good experiences and it's interesting to know what's happened to you, but none of that changes the fact that YouTube's content ownership framework doesn't allow people to dispute claims of ownership on public domain material. How would you feel if someone claimed ownership on your Tacoma Narrows Bridge collapse footage you assembled and chose to block it worldwide?
Well, that's what's happened with the famous Duck and Cover educational video. It's public domain, but Image Entertainment (whoever that is) has claimed copyright of it and are blocking it from being seen in all countries except the United States. This is described in the report [resource.org] which Cory mentions.
The issue isn't really whether or not YouTube are good guys or bad guys. The issue is that the system they have in place doesn't effectively allow for disputing whether or not something is in the public domain. This allows people to claim content which they don't own and to profit from it. People like yourself who want to use that public domain content can have their accounts suspended or blocked for using video and audio content including content in the public domain. Now, in your case, someone made a legitimate claim to some of the content you used for your video and YouTube handled that appropriately. That's good. But when people make claims to things they don't own, they're handling that in exactly the same way, which isn't appropriate. So, if you worked hard and created an interesting video using public domain content, a random company can siphon off some of your revenue from it simply by falsely claiming that they own the copyright on something which is actually in the public domain.
Re:Wait a minute... (Score:3, Informative)
IANAL, but unless you have a better citation, I'll believe 17 USC 512 [copyright.gov]:
Re:Been a problem for a long while (Score:4, Informative)
Since the other comments were not informative at all - There are separate copyrights for the recording and the score, often owned by different companies.
Smart artists who still want major-label backing will given in to RIAA contracts, but retain publishing rights. RIAA is left to police the album recording only, and the artist can either police or ignore any other representation of the music. Underinformed artists sign away all rights, and the RIAA or more likely ASCAP can go after any other version of the song as well.
Harry Fox, ASCAP, and BMI are usually the ones which "represent" songwriters, trolling bars to see if they are performing music (karaoke, live bands, or the Happy Birthday song) withoput having paid a performance license.
There are Bach scores in copyright because they have had editorial marks or updated notation (a direct copy with a new cover would not qualify). There are Bach recordings in copyright because they were recorded recently. The opposite is true as well. Many fine recordings and scores are public domain because they happened long enough ago.