“The civil liberties group Electronic Frontier Foundation appears to be mulling some sort of legal action against Viacom stemming from its recent demand that YouTube remove 100,000 clips — including clips with no connection to Viacom — from the site.

” ‘Were You Caught in the Viacom Takedown?’ the EFF asks in its own video [youtube.com/watch?v=OAd_vpsufRU], quietly uploaded to YouTube late last week. In the clip, the EFF says it wants to hear from any innocent parties caught in the recent dragnet. ‘If your video was taken down after complaints from Viacom, but contained either no viacom content at all, or fair use extracts, the Electronic Frontier Foundation would like to hear from you,’ the company wrote in comments posted with the clip — viewed nearly 9,000 times as of Friday morning.

“When Viacom served Google/YouTube with a list of videos to be expunged, Viacom included some clips that were entirely non-infringing. For instance, Viacom asked YouTube to take down a video of a group of friends having dinner at Redbones in Somerville, Mass.”

I hope you ate at Redbones when you were up here to play at Johnny D’s in December! Anyway, talk to the EFF; they’ve got your back.

http://www.scottandrew.com/blog/archives/2004/10/songfile.html

JY

Zac – yes, I alerted the Hoj, and his book publisher is looking into it.

Allen – amen brother. Everyone shut off your computer and go take a walk.

Managers will never write the login page. Only smart people can do that (I must say – people smarter than I…I’m just a simple musician…)

The message I take from this debate is not so much that we (individually or corporeally) have ANY control whatsoever over this vast, scary and hugely entertaining and enlightening entity we call “The Internets” (oh, wait…that’s what W calls it – I meant “The Internet” [singular]) but that we need to find our awesomness in actual real life.

The first thing I heard from JC (Jonathan Coulton, not the “other” JC) was the NPR piece a few months ago. I caught it just as “You Ruined Everything” was beginning, and I was totally hooked (“Shop Vac” was just a gimme after that!) I had just dropped my daughter off at school. My twenty-year-old daughter. I wept unabashedly to know that someone had so precisely distilled the feelings I had held so closely for so long.

THIS is the message of Jonathan Coulton (IMHO) – that real life is always better than any readily available alternative. Grow up. Have kids. Revel in glowing sunsets. If the Internets were to suddenly die, what would most of us do? I, for one, would probably have some sort of hissy – and eventually just get on with the life I have had for many wonderful years, and hope to have for many more to come.

I hold a fond hope that all of you (and the fab JC himself) would do the same. Hey, we could always trade cassettes, right?

Cheers,

Allen

http://www.eff.org/bloggers/lg/faq-ip.php

Whew. That was a lot of wide-eyed liberal raving. I need to go lie down now…

Anyone can go out of business. Anyone can have a server failure. Anyone can decide the best way to provide value to their shareholders (the only people a corporation is legally or ethically beholden to) doesn’t involve hosting all your awesomeness for free forever.

Theories about the evils of “corporations” are simplistic, and they miss the point: Always keep a backup copy of your data/awesomeness under YOUR control.

I had actually thought of myself as the “press” as regards my own website, but it is certainly the case that I am essentially leasing space with a webserver – similar to the way that smaller newspapers will buy press time from larger papers that own their own presses.

That’s really why you don’t get good tech support. It’s a nice fiction to think that [popular web site X] is being built by a group of guys in their basement or garage, but really it was either built by such folks and sold a long time ago, or is built in offices.

The folks who made the login page don’t even *see* your questions at the big sites. Maybe they’ll get a defect report some time down the line, but until then it’s a poor, underpaid tech support person who answers your question.

Well it’s happened to me more often than I like. But I’m rambling, so I think I’ll just end this post here.

“(f) Misrepresentations.— Any person who knowingly materially misrepresents under this section—
(1) that material or activity is infringing, or
(2) that material or activity was removed or disabled by mistake or misidentification,
shall be liable for any damages, including costs and attorneys’ fees, incurred by the alleged infringer, by any copyright owner or copyright owner’s authorized licensee, or by a service provider, who is injured by such misrepresentation, as the result of the service provider relying upon such misrepresentation in removing or disabling access to the material or activity claimed to be infringing, or in replacing the removed material or ceasing to disable access to it. “