Jim Moore’s blog: Innovation, Strategy, Public Policy

Al Gore for President public bookmark list

I just set up a page at IntelligentTeams that uses a new OPML bookmarklet system that Charlie Wood, Mary Melthaus and I have been playing with. If you are interested in Al Gore for President, or in OPML, or in social networking and presidential politics:

You can help out by visiting the page and doing any of the following:

1. Digg the page to bring attention to Al and attention to the use of social bookmarking to create networks of supporters for Al (and others, if you like).

2. Comment on the page.

3. Drag-and-drop (Firefox) the bookmarklet into your browser, and help us find good content on Al from around the web. Bookmark stuff on Al and his/our issues. I found a terrific Neil Young rock video based on the Gore movie…ok, I’m betraying my age as well as my politics, but I love Neil Young!

4. Use the “Invite friends” to send two or three emails about the page.

5. (Advanced) Use the “Edit folio” to do some clustering of the items, etc. Use the “Clone folio” to make a copy of the folio and “fork the folio” to make a new Al Gore folio of your own flavor.. Use ‘New folio” to start a new thread…

OK, I am not without an interest here. I need your help. I want to help Al, and I don’t know how.

I would love to help ginn up encouragement for Al, and help make connections among Al supporters in order not to fall behind the other candidates’ grassroots activities. Contact me on the “email to Opie” on the web site. Thanks so much for your help. Al needs us. We need Al. Let’s try to find each other sooner rather than later.

Mark my words, reporters: This is going to be a big day for PR flacks calling to pitch patent stories to you. Beware. Here is how you can expect them to talk:
The IBM-and-Microsoft-funded “patent reform” folks are going to be calling every news person they know today, pitching the story that “poor Microsoft” should not have to pay $1.6 billion to “this French company” for patent infringement. A great associated story, if you are an investigative journalist, is to look up the amount of patent infringement exposure Microsoft currently has in the litigation pipeline. The amount the last time I looked is about $12 billion. Does this mean Microsoft is being unfairly targeted by what it calls “trolls”? Is it possible Microsoft is guilty of much of this infringement? Is the Pope Catholic? Is it possible that Microsoft had a culture of impunity with regard to intellectual property?

I have written on this specific story in my previous post. Now I want to address another issue. Patents ARE the original open source mechanism. “Make your trade secrets public, and we will give you a limited property right to them. Let others freely try to work around them, and society will benefit from the innovation of the community.” Thomas Jefferson

But we do need a way for inventors to make available non-commercial, educational licensed use of thier ideas, but keep the commercial rights. Creative Commons does this for music.

Like laws governing parks and real estate, one can respect property rights, and have “public easements” over land for non-commercial users.

Creative Commons–set up to protect the property rights of the little guy, and make music freely available for non-commercial use.

From San Diego to Santa Monica:
Imagine a writer in San Diego that wants to make a song available free for non-commercial use–for friends, for social action, for YouTube videos and home-made music.

Then one day Brittney Spears records it in a studio in Santa Monica. The song is released on her new label, Shaved My Head Music, and the song goes platinum. Brittney, bless her soul, gets all the money if the song was put in the public domain by the songwriter in San Deigo.
Patent Commons is NOT such a solution. It is named after Creative Commons, but it is funded by IBM and others as a way to get individuals to give up property rights and undermine the system of property rights for software engineers and inventors of software.

Patent Commons is what Creative Commons would be like if it were funded by the recording industry. Creative Commons, in that case, would encourage the person in San Diego to make her song available to all, to renounce, with others–perhaps including Brittney–property rights to songs. This, by the way, would be a terrific deal for Brittney, who would have free songs to sing. By the way, as IBM becomes a consulting firm, it wants to be a free behemoth of consulting, with free technology. Concidence that IBM funds a particular type of “patent reform”? I don’t think so.

We need a “both-and” solution for patents: Patents ARE property, and that is not going to change. AND educational and non-commercial users of patented intellectual property should have easy ways to see what is available. Inventors should have easy ways to license non-commercial use of their intellectual property, without undermining their rights in the case of commercialization.

Isaac Newton said: If I have seen farther it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants.
A jury has decided that Microsoft must respect Bell Labs patents on which Microsoft has built its multimedia business. The principle here is that when you stand on the shoulders of giants such as Bell Labs scientists, you may have to feed them too.
Microsoft v Alcatel-Lucent [Bell Labs]

The Patent Board | Our Services | Data & Research Services | The Wall Street Journal - Readers Guide

Story One: Microsoft executives as bullies
Remember Danny the bully on the playground? And remember Eddie the clever little comic that could get under Danny’s skin? Edie would ridicule Danny the bully in front of Shirley and the other cute girls. Shirley and Patricia and Janette would snicker. Danny couldn’t do anything about it. Even if he pounded on Eddie, which he sometimes did, he could never look cool in the eyes of the girls.
Alcatel-Lucent, owners of Bell Labs (post the split-up of AT&T, for history buffs), have found a way to get under Microsoft’s skin. Oh yea. Make it clear for all to see that Microsoft’s touted research group had to license an MP3 encoder. And make it clear for all to see that Microsoft avoided licensing the encoder from its rightful inventor. Instead, Microsoft cut a sweetheart deal with a small offshore company to get an equivalent–but according to the jury invalid–license. And in this case Danny the bully may have to pay some damages to Edie. Big damages.
Microsoft execs can be bullies when it comes to stepping on others’ intellectual property. (Of course, they can also be very nice.) It’s former CTO has testified that when he worked at the company, there was a macho culture that encouraged ignoring other companies’ prowess and patents. Microsoft execs tended not to worry about licensing intellectual property, or even giving credit to previous inventors. The culture at Microsoft was to make anything necessary to win at competition. Execs dealt with issues like idea theft and intellectual property rights only as needed.

For years this worked for Microsoft, according to its CTO. Microsoft could pretty much bully its way around the playground.

Finally with the Netscape case, Microsoft was brought down. It bullied Netscape and was caught and disciplined. But not much, and taming the bully required years of effort on behalf of the government and many companies.

Now consider this: What if Netscape had patented its innovations? Netscape had licensed from the University of Illinois the core browser patents. Netscape had paid for the innovation it popularized. And Mark Andresson left the University of Illinois and joined Netscape and created a team that made many many new inventions. Do you remember when Netscape put out a new release ever few days?? Many of those would have been patentable inventions.

Should Netscape have patented those inventions? Yes, they should have!

Would Netscape patents have leveled the playing field when Microsoft started threatending and bullying Microsoft? In the famous meeting where Microsoft said to Jim Barksdale, the Netscape CEO, that Netscape would have to let Microsoft have the market or be crushed, would a strong portfolio of pending patents have led to a different conversation? I think so.

Now Microsoft is facing an acusation that it infringed ideas created at Bell Labs. Bell Labs can not be accused of being other than a real lab. Bell Labs may seem passe now, but Bell Labs brought us many of the most important information technology inventions of the past century. Bell Labs genuinely invested in innovation. If you put Bell Labs scientsts up against Microsoft research scientists, by any measure Bell Labs scientists did more innovation, more “deep innovation–for example in materials and semiconductors–they invented the transistor and fiber optic communications, for example.

Microsoft build an empire on top of innovation at Bell Labs and other companies. Now Microsoft may have to pay for that priviledge, or develop its own technlogy.

Oh, yea, remember, the first Microsoft operating system, DOS, was developed by little “Seattle Computing” and purchased by Microsoft who then licensed it to IBM…

———————————————-

Story Two: Bullies can crush an individual inventor even when she or he has patents.

Consider this story, based on true accounts and put into a fictionalized form:

An independent inventor named Joe lived in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. Joe educated himself in engineering at the nearby University of Iowa, lived modestly, and focused on inventing as new type of graphic display.

After ten years of work, Joe made a series of important inventions for touch screens and swirling images. These make possible a new form of user experience.

He was excited. Joe’s old high school buddy who runs a successful landscaping and garden center had partially financed him. He wondered if they and their families might get a little of their money back. They and Joe paid a total of $123,000 to file patents over the years, playing by the rules of innovation that started back in Thomas Jefferson’s day.

The inventor open sourced his ideas, relying for fairness of attribution and commercial return on patent protection.

Joe the inventor contributed his ideas to the public dialogue, openly. [By the way, Bell Labs did this as well, at a large scale. In addition, Bell Labs worked with universities to share and teach advanced ideas. Unix, the ancestor of Linux, was a Bell Labs operating system licensed free to education.]

Joe’s patent applications were published 18 months after each filing–years before they were successfully awared to him. Scientists at Microsoft and other companies read Joe’s patent applications and learned from them, and tried in many cases to engineer around them.

Joe did not hide behind trade secrets. He depending on the protection of patents in a world of open dialogue. He spoke to others in the industry. He was a good citizen of the innovation community.

Joe believed he did not need to be secretive, because he had patent protection. His inventions were his property, registered and certified by the government.

Under the law, Joe’s patents were exactly like the real estate title to his thee-bedroom, one-bath house and the 100 by 50 plot of land under it. His next door neighbor–a nice person, by the way– would not be able bully him out of his house and land, because he had title registered with the State of Iowa and the County of Linn.

Joe’s patents were a property right. Albeit a limited one. Land title lasts forever, and house title outlasts the house. In the case of patents, the title is of a limited term, so that if others cannot work around it, they can freely use it after a period of years. A patent is a limited-term property title to an invention. A patent provides a property right to something an inventor makes.

Joe decided the time was right to visit a big company, because he saw a big market that he and his friends in Cedar Rapids could not reach. [Cedar Rapids is not perhaps as isolated as you might think. Collins Radio was founded there. The founder of Go Daddy, the ever-clever Bob Parsons, started his prediscesor business Parsons Technology in Cedar Rapids.].

The people Joe met at the big company seemed very nice. They payed for his flights to Seattle, they put him up in a nice little boutique hotel on Lake Washington. He had never stayed in a boutique hotel before, and he especially liked the big fluffy pillows and the down comforter. He told his spouse and kids about this when he got back to Cedar Rapids.

The big company executives were happy to meet with Joe. They knew his work from his published patents and from his high profile in the community. The executives were so interested that they assembled nine people including six computer scientsts for the first meeting.

A leading big company scientist in the Graphics group said on behalf of the group that they were “very excited.” The inventor became excited. He thought to himself: “Finally myideas would reach fruition on a large scale. This big company had resources!”

After the first meeting he took an early flight from Seattle to Chicago. Then he flew a smaller regional jet into into Cedar Rapids. The whole way he was high! When the plane landed in Cedar Rapids, he practically danced down the steps from the plane and across the taxiway into the terminal. He barely noticed the light rain that drenched his blue cotton shirt.
Over the next few months discussions continue by phone. The company scientists talked with him. Some days he barely left his basement study, because he was trapped in endless conference calls. He put a small coffee maker in his study, so he could make coffee while his speaker phone was on mute.

His contacts at the big company apologized that “things move slowly here..”

Then one day a strange thing happened. He call Seattle and his main contact wasn’t available. He was “in a meeting”.

The inventor kept calling, but was not able to get through. Things seemed strange to him. The nice admin at the other end of the phone now seemed nervous and strangely distant. She had seemed so open before.
Then one day he checked his email, looked on the net, and saw a special announcement from the company. They had made “a revolutionary invention” in their labs.

He put an urgent call to the company. There must be a mistake.

The scientist does not call back. A person in the legal department responded later in the day. He said that there will be no deal. He said what the big company scientists learned in meeting with Joe was that their own technology was better. “We were working on it already.” Sorry.

———————————————————-

Joe did not have the resources to fight the bully. When he talked to lawyers, they didn’t want to take his case, because they had a “conflict” about suing a large potential client.

————————————————————

Times are changing. Now law firms will take small inventor’s claims. Private investors will fund these efforts. No longer can large firms step on small inventors with inpunity.

It is ironic that big companies call these small inventors “trolls.” Kind of insulting. The term “troll” was invented by the Intel chief lawyer. Intel?? Ask AMD about Intel and patent litigation. I think the record will show that Intel is perhaps the most aggressive about its patents and about stomping out small companies that it sees as infringers.

Let us go back to the playground. Is the class comic who gets under the skin of the bully a troll? Or a hero??

Is the class bully a “pillar of the technology establishment” and worthy of special “patent reform” to protect if from the class comic? From “trolls?”

Or is the bully a bully.

“Troll” is a term that bullies at Intel (this is literally true) popularized to deride and undercut support for the little guys who piss them off but who they can’t crush.

Welcome to the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy
Seminar and Book Event: What is the What
Monday, February 26
6:30pm, Doors open at 5pm
Location: Memorial Church, in the middle of Harvard Yard, just off Harvard Square
Please join us for a conversation with…
DAVE EGGERS
VALENTINO ACHAK DENG
&
SAMANTHA POWER
on
What is the What:
The Autobiography of Valentino Achak Deng
by Dave Eggers
Monday, February 26, 2007
6:30 p.m.
Memorial Church, Harvard Yard
Dave Eggers is the author of A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, You Shall Know Us By Our Velocity! and How We Are Hungry. In 1998, he founded McSweeney’s, an independent publishing house located in San Francisco that publishes books, a quarterly literary journal, The Believer, and a daily humor website.
Samantha Power is The Anna Lindh Professor of Practice of Global Leadership and Public
Policy at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government. Her book, A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide, was awarded the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for general non-fiction.
PRESENTED BY
The Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at Harvard University
PEN New England
The Sudanese Education Fund
For directions to Memorial Church visit: www.memorialchurch.harvard.edu/directions/direction
Books will be available for sale by Harvard Book Store.

Bryan Alexander posted this nice note:

Liberal Education Today - Post details: Teaching with OPML
Wednesday, February 7th, 2007
Teaching with OPML
Filed under: Pedagogy, Weblogs, Tools — Bryan Alexander @ 02:55:01 am

Ursinus College religion professor Nathan Rein is exploring using OPML files in the classroom. OPML files can organize information and sources in openly accessible, easy to use formats.

Rein mentions OPML Workstation [AKA Intelligent Teams] as one resource, where he created a sample class, along with one OPML reader.

————————————-

Imagine a course, “The Internet and Presidential Politics”. Imagine that you are the professor of this class. Imagine that you ask members of your class–perhaps a hundred students in all-to participate in the following experiment:

During the first week of class, each student personally invests two one-half-hour periods surfing the web. Students are asked to find material that might be of interest to the class as a whole, and might be relevant to the topic of the class.

The students click a special bookmarklet to capture pages. A simple click saves each contribution into a collective list fed by the selections of a hundred students! These selections are exhibited, most-recent-at-top, in an infinite scrolling list on a public web site.

After posting their contributions, students read through the listings and pick out three of most personal interest. In class and sections, students what moved them about their particular choices.

This exercise is hosted at OPML Workstation. The professor creates a “target folio” and writes a first paragraph to introduce the topic. The professor sets the access control to allow visitors to comment/edit the page. This is done with one click in the Writer, as the page is created. The entire time required is minimal.

Students are asked to visit the folio page. It is hosted at http://opmlworkstation.com/browse/theinternetandpresidentialpolitics
At the top of the page, just under the title, there is a drag-and-drop “Bookit” tag. Students drag this into their browser toolbar and it becomes a “bookmarklet.” As they subsequently surf the web, clicking the bookmarklet posts page references to the chosen folio.

Note, the bookmarklet is simple but powerful. Highlighted selections of text on the page are captured and posted. Comments can be added. YouTube or Google Video is automatically grabbed and is displayed.

Imagine the velocity of contributions that could be achieved with a dozen students, or a hundred! Lots of fun to see what is posted to the shared feed!

Let us know when you try this!

Background summary of my experience with video yanking by Viacom

Good news

Here is the communication I just received from YouTube:

Dear Mr. Moore,

Viacom International has retracted its copyright claim with respect to the
video:

http://youtube.com/watch?v=QUzOP42dg1I

This content has been restored and your account will not be penalized.

Sincerely,

The YouTube Team

Bad News

Other innocent folks are still having their videos yanked, and/or are just realizing they’ve been yanked (check yours if you haven’t yet!).

Here is a sample of the mail coming into YouTubeViacom@gmail.com. It does make you wonder what Viacom was thinking:

From: ZZalgern0n
Date: Feb 6, 2007 12:29 AM
Subject: my video was yanked
To: YouTube.Viacom@gmail.com

“my video, too, was taken down. i’m assuming because of COLBERT REPORT.
the video in question is called - “Lil’ Hobo - Astrology Report, Aries”

i even wrote the music to this one. i’m sure viacom has no claims
whatsoever to it. it’s a very short faux astrology report by a demented
puppet, who ultimately tries to convince people to commit suicide. can be
seen here:

http://www.ZZalgern0n.com/HoboAstrology.mov

bunch of BS this whole thing is”

-ZZalgern0n, filmmaker

http://www.ZZalgern0n.com
http://www.pixellate.com

Relevant links

Situation summary at TopTenSources: Organize with others if the Viacom Sweep caught up your personal video

Google Blog Search for “Viacom YouTube”

My first post about being “caught up in the sweep.”

Who owns this video???

John Dvorak Uncensored on “Viacom Idiots”

Cory Doctorow of BoingBoing on “Viacom terrorizes YouTube with bullshit DMCA notices”

For most of this day I have departed from my usual posting of chapters of my book, OPML, to comment on the dispute between Viacom and YouTube over 100,000 videos that Viacom has asked YouTube to take down. My own personal video was caught up in the sweep “by mistake” as I presume were the videos of thousands of other folks.

This dispute is highly relevant to the OPML vision. The OPML vision is that users–ordinary folks–can collect, comment on, assemble and share elements of digital culture.

YouTube and its owner Google have come down firmly on the side of this vision. OPML and similar “meta languages” are ways to create folios, indexes, directories, lists and mashups of the content that is strewn across the web. Google has made the first stage of the OPML vision possible by indexing this content. Google has enabled astonishingly easy and comprehensive access to the riches of the digital landscape.

Google has found a way to fund their service from advertising, and in the process has developed a business model for working with others in the web ecosystem, others who provide the richness that is the new media landscape. And Google has increasingly found ways to enable small content producers, whether bloggers or video makers, to monetize their content. Many may question the revenue split between Google and others, but few would want Google to go away. Google has been a remarkable promoter of open public digital creativity.

Viacom and other traditional media companies have a different model. Their model is to find exceptional talent, develop that talent to the highest level, and then make the expressions of talent available for a hefty fee. Their model is to create scarcity. They invest millions in self-promotion for their stars, in order to create a taste for what only their stars can do. Then they lock down the creative production of these stars, and charge dearly for access.

The new model will not, in my view, favor Viacom and scarcity. It will create abundance beyond Google.

» YouTube: Is Viacom hurting innocent YouTubers? | Digital Markets | ZDNet.com
Donna Bogatin has expanded the discussion by suggesting that YouTube and Google are the real villains, not Viacom. Her argument is that Viacom is only protecting its rights against what she sees as a parasitic Google business model. She seems to believe that if I am to be upset at anyone for taking down my personal video on YouTube, it should be YouTube for complying with the DMCA and the Viacom DMCA request.

Let me clarify my position: Viacom is the source of the request to take down my video. Viacom had an obligation to make sure that it was correct in its belief that my video violated its copyrights. My video is wildly innocent. Really. Visit it. Spend twenty seconds making your own judgement.

If Viacom made this sort of mistake thousands of times, presumably because it used spiders to decide which videos to request be removed, then its actions resulted in a massive disruption of the comfort of thousands of innnocent uers of the service.

Finally, let me say that I did not seek this fight. I have lately become fascinated by video, and am a reasonably big personal user of YouTube. My big interest is videos of performers of “roots” music. For example, here is my brother Dave Moore’s music site, which depends on YouTube. I was genuinely stunned when I opened my Yahoo mailbox this afternoon, and say a DMCA Complaint notice. I was upset when I realised that my personal video had been presumptively judged guilty, and taken down.

In her column, Donna goes after me and the Berkman Center, and others in the free culture movement, arguing that we are being bought off by Google, and thus are softpeddling YouTube in this dispute. Wooo, Donna. Hang on there. This thing just started this afternoon. And it was not started by YouTube, and it certainly was not started by me. There are any number of other things I would have liked to do with my time today.
Donna has argued in other posts that there is a kind of economic conspiracy between those advocating “free culture” and Google.

Google forges ahead in its misssion to codify its “right” to perpetuate a $150 billion market cap business model based on selling ads against content it has not compensated IP owners for and that it has no explicit legal right to exploit commercially.

She implies that I am going soft on YouTube and hard on Viacom, and I am perhaps part of a movement funded by Google. She points out that I have been associated with the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard, and that Berkman and the Stanford Center for Internet & Society founded “Chilling Effects” as a clearinghouse for combating cease-and-desist notices. She calls out fellow Berkmanite and friend Wendy Selzer by name. Wendy, many of you know, is one of the most dedicated and devoted of defenders of information freedom working today. Donna implies that because Google has given money to those in the free culture movement, that the movement is tainted. She subtly implies that I might be doing the bidding of Google in expressing my anger at Viacom. Crazy!! All I can say is that Berkman and Stanford and many others–including me–come to our various positions on free culture, and on Google–without presuppositions. We are hardly available to be bought by Google! In any cases, funding for centers like those at Harvard and Stanford come from many many individuals and companies. The funders do not set the agenda. Hardly. If anything they go along for the ride and hope for the best!

But in the interest of dialogue, go read Donna’s article, link above. Here is an excerpt, fair use:

Moore may feel he is an innocent YouTuber, but he is not an uninterested YouTube bystander. The “local talent” he is enlisting is undoubtedly colleagues advocating on behalf of “Chilling Effects,” an “online clearinghouse for analysis and response to cease-and-desist notices sent to Internet users.”

According to the “Berkman Center for Internet & Society”:

Founded at the Berkman Center by Fellow Wendy Seltzer, Chilling Effects is a joint project of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and law school clinics at Harvard, Stanford, Berkeley, the University of San Francisco, and the University of Maine. Do you know your online rights? Have you received a cease and desist letter asking you to remove information from a Web site or to stop engaging in an activity? Are you concerned about liability for information that someone else posted to your online forum? If so, Chilling Effects is for you. Chilling Effects aims to help you understand the protections that the First Amendment and intellectual property laws give to your online activities.

Chilling Effect collaborator Stanford Center for Internet and Society receives funding from YouTube corporate parent Google, as I report and analyze in “Google’s $2 million Stanford ‘fair use’ underwriting”:

Google has funded, to the tune of $2 million, Stanford University’s Center for Internet and Society to “change the way content owners approach fair use issues.

I put forth Google’s strategy to subsidize academic institutions in championing legal doctrine favorable to Google’s business model..

Donna Bogatin, ZDNet.com

I heartily support Donna’s continuing analysis of the relationships among business models and public policy and law, as well as funding for “reform.” I myself have written a good deal about the curruption of “patent reform” by the world’s largest patent filers.

In this case, however, I can assure Donna that I am calling things as I see them. I do wish that YouTube had stepped up to do more on my behalf and that of others. I would have appreciated help in filing a challenge. I would appreciate being able to gain access to my own disputed video, in part to demonstrate how innocent it is. It took great effort this afternoon to locate another copy of the video, given that it was not exactly archival material.

On the other hand, the DMCA ties YouTube’s hands. Penalties are sharp. So Viacom was able to force YouTube to act, and to act in a presumptive and sudden manner that not only disrupted the YouTube service, but made for a bad day for many thousands of YouTube users. That, in my view, was not a good thing for Viacom to do. I don’t doubt the reasonableness of their making money from Jon Stewart. But I do think that they should have set their net with a finer filter. Part of their argument against YouTube and Google is that they have been slow to build a content filter. Well, Viacom has now demonstrated what happens when you build a filter too quickly. Inadvertantly it has helped make the argument that filtering is difficult.

Added Sunday 2/4/07: List of Relevant links

Situation summary at TopTenSources: Organize with others if the Viacom Sweep caught up your personal video

Google Blog Search for “Viacom YouTube”

My first post about being “caught up in the sweep.”

Who owns this video???

John Dvorak Uncensored on “Viacom Idiots”

Cory Doctorow of BoingBoing on “Viacom terrorizes YouTube with bullshit DMCA notices”

YouTube and Viacom: TopTenSources has organized a way to send in your DMCA notices and see how many folks were victimized by the Viacom “mistake.”

As everybody knows now, Viacom forced YouTube to take down 100,000 videos today, and to send out tens of thousands of DMCA Complaint notices. I received one for a genuine personal video that is certainly not infringing on Viacom. Here is the video, now hosted at Google Video. Let me know what you think!
John Palfrey of the Berkman Center blogged about my situation, and he received a very nice email from a man named Michael Fricklas of Viacom. Mr. Fricklas apologized for the mistake, and said that it had already been corrected. Hmmm. When I last checked, which was just a minute ago, the video was blocked. You can try it yourself by clicking here. If they’ve restored it, you will view my simple minded tube–if they’ve not, you will see

This video has been removed at the request of copyright owner Viacom International Inc. because its content was used without permission

From: “Fricklas, Michael”

Date: Fri, 2 Feb 2007 18:21:02

To:

Subject:

Saw your blog post about your video coming down (at least I think it was your post)

There’s a simple procedure for protesting a takedown - but when we saw your blog we corrected the error. We actually do view (supposedly) every video being taken down, but sometimes stuff gets through.

Sorry for any problem

Now I must ask: Do you realy really think they viewed every video? David Weinberger speculates that Viacom used spiders to search for “Leon Redbone” and found my video about “Sunday nite dinner at Redbones in Somerville, Mass.” Yup. LOL, as they say.

PS, David wondered what would happen if blogosphere folks uploaded geniune personal videos with the names of various Viacom stars–just to see what happens.

Sunday nite dinner at Redbones in Somerville, Mass, a very short video by Jim Moore - Google Video

Play the video. I think it speaks for itself.

Viacom will of course say that this is a “mistake.” The question is, out of the 100,000 videos taken down today on YouTube at Viacom’s request, how many “mistakes” were there? 1? 10? 10,000? If you believe you were a victim of a “mistake” by Viacom, please forward your DMCA Complaint email to youtube.viacom@gmail.com, which is a group sponsored by TopTenSources and some folks associated with Harvard Law School.

For current news and action, check periodically at http://www.toptensources.com/topten/YouTube-and-Viacom

Fight back for free culture!