If you follow the links, you end up here: http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/archives/005109.php

…where the EFF asks people whose videos were pulled inappropriately to contact them.

According to Viacom, “no more than” 60 of the 100,000 takedowns were errors (seems to me that I read about more that that here).

I have a rich life.

Entirely too detailed information at http://www.copyright.gov

The number I think I heard was 10%, though that invariably sounds extremely small. It seems strange that you’d only have to change 1/10th of the content. I know there’s a grain of truth in here, but I don’t know where it goes.

I hope someone else will host the Baby Got Back video, though this site doesn’t really seem to be geared towards that possibility.

About YouTube: I see it all as control. YouTube is an immense cultural influence on America, and when it comes right down to it, corporations are only about money so far as money results in control. If they can get control without money, sometimes it’s just as good to them, even if it ends up making no sense at all to the common individual.

I’ve tried to submit videos of your stuff before but i guess the trick is to shamelessly reference anna nicole or britney to get greenlit…

http://forums.fark.com/cgi/fark/comments.pl?IDLink=2673873

cheers

Yes, I do keep USC Title 17 on hand at all times. Why do you ask?

1) fight a long and drawn out legal battle, be vilified in the end, but not receive any compensation. This is the same as losing millions of dollars, as the legal team required to fight this battle would be very well paid.

2) Settle out of court for millions of dollars. This is faster, and thus often more attractive.

I knew there was a reason that I’d lost faith in the legal systems of the civilized world.

It’s one of those issues that you can go both ways on… Bi-legal?

On the one hand - Cool stuff I can’t see anymore.

On the other hand - Viacoms right to charge money for content they produced.

The scales of justice must weigh carefully…..

Be careful what you wish for… that’s an awful lot of stuffed monkeys.

There is so much great content on YouTube that’s posted by the people who created it, and I think that’s what the “You” in “YouTube” is all about (after all, “You” were TIME Magazine’s person of the year).

If YouTube has a user agreement whereby the poster of the material must attest that it’s not in violation of Copyright law, then the user shoulders the majority of the blame, but YouTube should take on the responsibility of policing their own site and not just waiting for someone to say something.

At the end of the day, Viacom is bringing attention to a problem and, while they may not win their $1 Billion (which is likely for shock purposes), they will hopefully cause YouTube to reform it’s service such that people who expect to get paid for their work don’t get the benefit of free advertising for their work, and such that creative individuals who are producing genuinely entertaining material without the power of “the machine” behind them can stand out more. I’d say everybody wins.

-Eric

When you get your billion, will you buy me a pony? Or a half-pony half monkey monster?

In order to win the suit, Viacom would need to show that YouTube is not protected by the Safe Harbor passage. Doing this would spell doom for the many smaller user-content sites, as well as Viacom’s iFilm. As such, I don’t think winning the court case is their goal.

This makes me think that Viacom is more interested in bringing Google back to the negotiating table, but under Viacom’s terms.

@Liam
What BitTorrent sites being successful sued? I know of sites that have been raided (The Pirate Bay), shut down by their ISPs (ISOHunt), shut down as part of a settlement in a lawsuit (LokiTorrent), or shut down due to legal pressure (SuprNova), but none (that I know off) have been shut down by losing a court case.

Doesn’t Viacom own one of YouTube’s competitors? Wouldn’t Viacom be liable for a billion dollars in damages if someone were to upload a copyrighted thing I created to the Viacom-owned iFilm?

I think the solution to this problem has become apparent.

So most places, if they bothered at all, simply sent “cease and desist” letters.

But now that Google owns them, and Google has some pretty damn deep pockets, now they’re a target.

This seemed like a really bad purchase for Google to me. (By the way, the “We just host things, with this volume of links we can’t be expected to police it all” theory has already been shot down by several of the BitTorrent index sites, who were found to be in violation of the law even though all they had, technically, was a pointer to where someone ELSE was violating the law. Something about “aiding and abetting” or something.)

We’ll see how it works out.

Liam.

Which has me worried, because a whole lot of what’s worthwhile on there (or at least fun to watch) is old stuff that isn’t available any other way, but might still be owned by someone’s copyright. Frinstance, I was watching a whole bunch of clips from old 70s shows the other day, just as a nostalgia thing. It’d be a crying shame it this sort of stuff was no longer on GooTube just because some people are upset they are somehow losing money because more people have access to their TV shows. (Whereas if they made more of this stuff available on iTunes, maybe with free teaser previews on YouTube, they’d make a couple of mints.

There’s another part of the law that says that the distributor (YouTube) can’t profit from the copyrighted material, but that seems to be a wacky gray area. If, for example, YouTube ran ads on a page with a clip of the Daily Show, they’d be making money from the clip. But they probably don’t even know it’s there and don’t have to take it down until Viacom asks them to, so what are they supposed to do about the money they accidentally made off of the copyrighted material? Give it to Viacom? How are they supposed to know how much money they’re making on copyrighted material if they don’t even know it’s there until they’re informed of it? Zany.

How many vids were clear copyright violations vs. arguable fair use vs. false positives (like spiff’s WoW stuff).

Seems to me that Viacom wouldn’t have much of a case if a big percentage of the videos they’re complaining about isn’t even theirs.