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."
No Public Domain (Score:5, Interesting)
Public domain music too. (Score:5, Interesting)
I just spent a few hours making a video and set it to public domain music. A day later, Youtube blocked it in Germany and said it might put ads on it. The appeals process went straight to the company claiming ownership of the music and was unsurprisingly rejected with no other course of action.
Time for YouTube/FedFlix to make money (Score:5, Interesting)
Once disney and a few others have to pay for EXPENSIVE lawyers AND massive penalties, they might think twice about stealing and lying.
Devil's advocate (Score:4, Interesting)
Just because the government made something, doesn't mean it was completely legal. Governments can break their own laws too.
Just because the films were made at public expense by the government and nobody can claim ownership of the films, doesn't mean all content used to produce the films was properly licensed for release in the public domain.
The copyright system may be immoral and ethically wrong, the corporations are (probably) still within the legal boundaries. Hate the game, not the players.
Re:Been a problem for a long while (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Wait a minute... (Score:5, Interesting)
Lately, every video I upload to YouTube (of myself playing classical music e.g. Bach) gets flagged by content ID, supposedly matching content owned by some "Music Publishing Rights Collecting Society". If you Google it, it seems to be an umbrella term from YouTube saying your content matched something that someone, somewhere in the world, said they own the rights to. I believe the system is fully automatic, using sophisticated "finger-print" matching to identify infringing works. My theory is that their matching system has to be coarse enough to catch transcoded video & audio, and this coarseness allows original performances such as mine to "match" copyrighted recordings. I guess that's a compliment.
This isn't exactly DMCA abuse - in that I don't think anyone views the content and files a claim. It seems to be automatic. I always just check the box that says Content ID has misidentified the work - which it has since my own recording is not copyrighted by anyone else, obviously. But still, it's a nuisance because every time I upload I have to wait a day or two for content ID to do its thing, and then respond so it won't show ads. This and the fact that they down-sampled all my older recordings to crappy quality has left me very unsatisfied with the service lately.
I want my money back! ;)
Counter-measures (Score:5, Interesting)
FedFlix should create "derivative works" who would then not be in the public domain.
Adding one image at the begining telling "FedFlix brings you !", and one at the end with "Thank you for watching" and maybe a small watermark would be enough and trivial to automate.
This would create an "infringable" copyrighed notice, and then anybody who would want to benefit from the FedFlix "marketing" to push their adds would be "infringing" could be "expulsed" and potentially be "banned" from youtube (it would be fun to see FedFlix asking google "why isn't this dangerous repeat offender "CBS" banned ?
Of course it seems "pointless" but just as the GPL is using copyright to implement copyleft, you need sometime to use private means to promote the public domain.
I wonder why they didn't do it ...
happened to me, but YouTube is part of solution (Score:5, Interesting)
We've actually come a long way in the last decade in terms of being able to make public use of the public domain in the U.S. The vast majority of works that are PD in the US are ones that were copyrighted after 1922 but reverted to the public domain because their copyrights were not renewed. It used to be that if you came across a book from 1927, you could be almost certain that it was PD (simply because, statistically, few books had their copyrights renewed), but you wouldn't have any way of making sure, because the renewal records weren't online. But the good folks at Carnegie Mellon, Project Gutenberg, and Distributed Proofreaders did all the hard, dreary work of digitizing the records and putting them online [blogspot.com] in searchable form. So for example, a creative-commons-licensed physics textbook that I wrote includes a drawing of a boy hanging by his arms from a bar. The drawing is from a 1927 physics textbook, which I know is PD because I was able to check online that the copyright was not renewed. Another great thing about living in the US is that our law says that a faithful reproduction of a PD work can't be copyrighted (Bridgeman Art Library, Ltd. v. Corel Corp., 1999). I have a portrait of Isaac Newton in my book that is a photo of a 17th-century oil painting. I got a nastygram once from the museum in the UK that owns the painting, saying I was violating their copyright. Sent them back an email saying, "Sorry, not copyrightable in the country where I live," and that was the end of that.
It gets a lot harder when you're dealing with sound recordings and moving pictures. The records aren't digitized by the government, and even if they were to be digitized, it would not necessarily be easy to index and search them. Unlike a book, a sound recording doesn't always have any clear labeling as to its title. Indexing sound and movies is a hard problem. It requires a ton of computing power to do well. What we really need is someone with a super-huge CPU farm who is willing to put tons of computational effort into indexing these things. I wonder who has the facilities necessary for that? Uh, Google, that's who. Google owns YouTube.
Here [youtube.com] is a PD video I put together of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge collapsing -- a classic staple of American physics education for three generations. About 10 years ago, you could only get this by paying a ton of money to an educational video company. I found two newsreels about the bridge at archive.org, one silent and one with music and narration. I spliced them together. Since the first one was silent, I found a recording of some vintage jazz that fit, and voila, I had a PD replacement for the laserdisc that my college had bought for hundreds of dollars.
About a year later, I got an email from YouTube saying that the jazz tune I'd used in the video (Boot It, by Bennie Moten) actually wasn't PD. I was originally annoyed and sure they were wrong. But I looked into it, and it looked like sure enough, it was still in copyright. Archive.org had apparently not realized that a certain percentage of Bennie Moten's work was still in copyright. The rights holder is selling the recording online. And you know what? YouTube didn't try to crush me. They didn't sue me. They didn't send me a DMCA notice. They didn't take down the video or make me take it down. They simply started pulling revenue from it and giving some of that revenue to the copyright owner. Really not a problem.
So although it sounds like FedFlix has a problem, my own experience with YouTube was that they performed a service for me that nobody else was willing to perform: they figured out whether an old piece of music was actually PD. The end result is that it's a big win for everyone.
And I can't help feeling that Cory Doctorow, as in many of his hand-wringing advocacy pieces, is being a little overwrought. The problem here is not that FedFlix is being su
Re:Been a problem for a long while (Score:5, Interesting)
This sounds like it needs to be counter exploited, and hard.
The only way to establish precident for enforcement of false copyright claims, is to have a phyrric entity serving in the public's interest do exactly what big content is doing, but directed at big content.
An example might be to create a software program that outputs every possible combination of notes permissible under the rules of standard musical notation, then file copyright on it. Using this copyrighted "song", file DMCA takedown notices of every single big media production featuring a musical score, claiming that they are profiting illegally from a partial inclusion of your copyrighted "song".
Keep spamming the shit out of eg, the CBS and pal's youtube offerings with dmca notices, exploit the one-sidedness of the reporting system in the same way they exploit it against far use and public domain assets, and keep after it in earnest.
After a few weeks of that, the big media giants will sue. When they do, they will use their lawyers to win, and in so doing, establish a poisonous precedent against this practice.
The only way to get the assfucks to work for you is to socially engineer them into painting themselves into a corner.
I suggest that we (ordinary people) endeavor to do exactly that.
Re:Been a problem for a long while (Score:2, Interesting)
They're stiffing their entire userbase? Hyperbole isn't really the best way to make your argument. It is, however, a good way to make sure no one actually reads what you have to say. In any event, when a corporation (or a person or a small business) has to decide between their users and their customers, the people who pay the bills are going to win 9 times out of 10. That's just reality, regardless of how "dick" you may think it is.
Re:That's a criminal offense (Score:4, Interesting)
Making knowingly false statements is all that is needed. You can't say "oops, we made a mistake" in most jurisdictions on that score. When it's a knew or should have known type situation (this would be it...), you're going to face the Fraud music- the big problem there, though, is getting the DoJ to own up to it being their responsibility and acting upon the same.
Re:Wait a minute... (Score:5, Interesting)
Yes, there are penalties for frivolous legal claims --- if it's proven that the claim is indeed frivolous. You'll have noticed that a lot of claims reported by Slashdot never make it to court. They're either settled or the victim wilts under pressure. Because of that, the claims are safe from court scrutiny. Even if the claim does get to court, awarding fees only is not much since this is usually one of the first motions to be put forward if it's going to be. $3.25 isn't much of a penalty.
No, to deter frivolous claims, the penalties have to be a lot more severe. If the person targeted can show probable intent to harm (versus intent to recoup losses), then that should automatically kick in a criminal investigation for 'demands with menaces' (commonly referred to as blackmail). Criminal cases aren't funded by individuals, so individuals don't have to pay for the cost of two competing lawsuits at the same time.
Further, I'm not keen on this absolute frivolous-or-not thing. The UK provides the judge with the right to divide up costs as appropriate according to how frivolous either side is being. It's not either/or. Of course, this only works in theory, as judges in the UK (anyone remember Judge Pickles?) can be incredibly... ...strange at times and are just as prone to bias as any other judges, and Legal Aid won't help civil cases. (IMHO, it should help in any case where either one of the sides has an unfair advantage likely to pervert the course of justice or where the penalty for losing the case would likely exceed the limits traditionally considered acceptable under Common Law. But that's just me, I like justice to not merely be done but to be SEEN to be done.)
Re:Wait a minute... (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Re:No Public Domain (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm no Constitutional scholar, but I've always taken the bit "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries." to mean that ultimately, Intellectual "Property" ultimately belonged to the Commons and copyright was merely a limited grant to allow creators to exclusively draw profit for a short while. Whether or not that was the original intent, the system has gone too far in allowing thuggish "squatters" on public "property" control it via force of (government) arms. Even the creators who should be the ones benefiting from copyright have it taken away in a Devil's deal just so they can get what pittance these cartels are willing to grant.
It has gone beyond any reason and I wish there was some hope of a Pirate Party gaining any traction in my country. (Sorry, would have modded you up, but I felt the need to comment).
Re:Wait a minute... (Score:4, Interesting)
Ya, back in 2004, I went on a Royal Caribbean cruise. One of the islands that they own, CoCo Kay, was one of the stops along the way. It was the first time I had ever been on a cruise before, and so at one point, on the CoCo Kay island, I just set my camera down on a picnic table and pressed record. I wanted to capture the music, the sound of the waves, the people walking past. I wanted to be able to go back to that moment in time.
In 2006, I posted it on YouTube, because one of the family members wanted to see it, and my daughter had a friend in the Bahamas who wanted to show her family what CoCo Kay looked like (it's a ways away from Nassau..).
In 2009, Sony laid claim to the video because of the music playing in the background, and slapped ads all over my video.
In 2012, I will be putting my own content server up for me and my family, and screw the rest of those sites. Bye Facebook, Google+, YouTube. Don't need ya anymore.
Re:Been a problem for a long while (Score:5, Interesting)
That's just the easy part. You also need to be able to get legal representation of the right kind. If you can't afford a lawyer, you won't get the precedent that you need.
You will have to be very careful to:
a) Have someone show up the the trial or the case will be summarily dismissed without any precedent being set.
b) Have a lawyer who keeps the argument on-track enough so that the corporation's slimy lawyers can't avoid the counter-arguments that you need to have heard in court.
c) Avoid having a judge order you to attempt to settle or go into some sort of arbitration or dismiss the case as frivolous. Judges will not like your attempt to game the system and clog up their already huge caseloads and will make it very difficult indeed to get the right precedent that you want. Since they write the decisions that create the precedents, it's as much about painting a judge into a corner, as it is the corporations.
d) Have a lawyer who can stand up to possible ethics and professional charges when they try trickery like this. There are rules, even among thieves.
e) Not win your case.
Point E is sort of funny, but you can easily end up doing the work of the corporations for you. And both the respondent and even the judge may well collude to give you a victory, especially if they understand your motives.
Re:Public domain music too. (Score:2, Interesting)
It was out of copyright music performed by the USAF band and found on a site dedicated to non-copyrighted music. My best guess is the song also appears on an album by a major label, which of course doesn't equal a claim to copyright. I don't know for sure because they don't list the actual company.
Re:Wait a minute... (Score:3, Interesting)
Well let's not forget that since he didn't state explicitly that he set down his "high definition DLSR professional grade camera with boom mikes", chances are the quality of the recorded music was rather poor indeed. Not to mention that the music was completely incidental to what he was intending to record (if that even matters). The idea that just because they are legally allowed to issue take down notices, doesn't mean they are required to do so, nor that they should.
I can just see the boardroom scene now:
"OMG, some guy recorded our song as background noise while taking a video of his vacation. WON'T ANYONE THINK OF THE PROFITS????"
"Nuke that video from orbit, it's the only way to be sure"
LOL. If anything, this is just evidence that there are outsourced Indians mindlessly clicking through check boxes, "Is this infringing? Yes/No/Retry"