» 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
Google Blog Search for “Viacom YouTube”
My first post about being “caught up in the sweep.”
John Dvorak Uncensored on “Viacom Idiots”
Cory Doctorow of BoingBoing on “Viacom terrorizes YouTube with bullshit DMCA notices”
