On Sunday, January 18, 2009 Pete Seeger and Bruce Springsteen performed at one of the Inaugaration celebration concerts - specifically at Lincoln Park. A video of their duet performance of “This Land Is Your Land” was, of course, posted on YouTube. It has since been removed at the request of HBO.
I’d link to the video, but obviously it’s no longer available. You can see one single shot though in the embed here.
What I find most interesting about this, however, is the fact that YouTube lists exactly who requested the video be removed. Obviously this is not a new practice, but it is worth taking note of the fact that YouTube is trying to lay the blame for the lack of a video where the blame is due, thereby easily deflecting the blame from themselves as well as making sure YouTube doesn’t get any negative response from their take-downs.
UPDATED AT 7:30 CST:
The video now appears to be available at YouTube. Looks like HBO has lifted their ban.
I never thought I’d see the day when YouTube was accused of taking down videos based on too little of a copyright claim, but that’s apparently what’s been happening recently in the ongoing battle between Scientology and the group “Anonymous” (basically the anti-Scientology group).
According to an article at Ars Technica, the majority of the videos have been reinstated, but only after being taken down in the first place. Obviously as YouTube makes efforts to better curtail illegal content being uploaded to their site they are not doing due diligence to affirm the copyright ownership of the claimant. This brings up a question on the fine line between when should and when shouldn’t something be displayed. Obviously if something is up without permission of the copyright holder and the copyright holder asks to have it removed, it should be removed (barring fair use, etc). But what about people who claim to own the copyright and use the DMCA as a way to pull content they just frankly do not like? Is the DMCA perhaps still too strict? Or is YouTube being overly cautious nowadays?
Article Description:
A mysterious entity called American Rights Counsel demanded that 4,000 videos criticizing Scientology be pulled form YouTube late last week. After the counter-notices poured in, the videos went back up, but the war between Scientology and the mask-wearing group “Anonymous” appears to be heating up. Next battle: Broadway.
In a recent post here at IPThieves, we discussed the problems with issuing take-down notices as a sole method for copyright holders to try to stave off so-called “illegal” sites from giving away copyright-protected material for free. Since then, we’ve spent some time really looking at more effective methods of the copyright holders could use to stop piracy or theft of their intellectual property.
Of course, one of the most popular methods from the RIAA has been to try to scare individuals into not downloading music illegally in the first place by suing or threatening to sue people who do so. Whether this has worked or not is highly questionable, although it is definitely the case that they have created quite a bit of ill-will by directly going after their potential customers.
When it comes to pirate and illegal download sites, networks and software, there are generally three different types:
One is the group of people who want to trade or allow for free downloads of the material because they genuinely believe that information should be free, and they consider intellectual property to be a form of information - therefore to enforce their philosophy, it is almost a moral obligation for them to build systems to allow this trading and sharing.
The second group of people share and trade for a bit more selfish reason, which is that they do it so they can also receive content, information, etc. for free. This is the main concept behind most p2p networks - people share their content and they in turn can gain access to content from other people.
The third group, however, look at this as a business model. These are the sites that offer large quantities of unlicensed, copyright-protected content to their users (usually for free, although Grooveshark is a whole different story) and financially leverage the traffic generated through ads and other promotions paid for by third parties.
One area that has specifically focused on this third type is the phenomenon of guitar tablature web sites (or other “print” content sites). Ultimate-Guitar.com, for example, continually ranks among the top five music websites - and the vast majority of its traffic has been from the unlicensed displays of tablature for copyright-protected songs. Although it has not officially announced any numbers, the site is expected to generate several million dollars of ad revenue each year - all of which goes directly to the site owners and operators.
So, for this third “advertising-supported-business” group, one question that no one seems to ask is why are advertisers continuing to support them? The answer, of course, is because this is where their potential customers are. It’s why you’ll see ads for cell-phone companies, credit cards and other products aimed at a younger late-teen to early thirties audience plastered all over ultimate-guitar.
Then again, most of these types of sites are using ad networks to get their advertising - the most popular of which is Google Adsense. But one quick look at the Google AdSense Program Policies makes it completely clear that these types of sites are not allowed to display Google Ads:
Website publishers may not display Google ads on web pages with content protected by copyright law unless they have the necessary legal rights to display that content. Please see our DMCA policy for more information.”
If Google is really telling the truth here about their policies, then shouldn’t these sites be taken off the adsense network? If publishers and copyright holders are smart about this, wouldn’t it make sense to cut off the money source, at least for this third group of advertising-supported businesses that are relying on someone else’s property to make their money?
Sure, the sites could switch to other networks, but the majority of networks have the same policies. And for those that don’t, one could argue that the ad networks themselves (including Google) are directly profiting from the theft of intellectual property, since the networks also take a share of all the advertising revenue generated by their partner sites (before giving the site itself their share).
Wouldn’t that mean Google is directly profiting from the theft of intellectual property? Of course it would - but then again this seems to be the basis for most of Google’s business model (take YouTube for example). And who’s willing to take on Google?
If you’re a fan of anime (Japanesese animation), then the site lovelyanime.com might be the one for you. They boast to have video from over 550 individual anime series (including Neon Genesis Evangelion, Naruto, and .hack) available on their site.
Is it legal? Again, this is similar to the questions posed in my previous post re: The Pirate Bay. Here’s what Lovely Anime has to say:
None of the videos on this website are hosted on our servers or servers of staff, family members or otherwise related in any way whatsoever. Unless otherwise stated, all videos on this site are uploaded by and hosted on the servers of third-parties, so called Video Sharing Websites, such as Veoh.com or Youtube.com. In case of copyright infringement or any other issue, please directly contact the responsible parties, not us. LovelyAnime.com operates under the laws of the United States of America functioning as a mere index and database of content found publicly on the internet, in principle operating in the same fashion as Google.
Users who upload to video sharing websites such as YouTube, Veoh, Myspace, Megavideo, LiveVideo, Imeem, Guba and other video sharing sites agree not to upload illegal content when creating their user accounts. LovelyAnime.com does not accept responsibility for content hosted on third party websites.
So, they’re not hosting any of this content but are instead acting as kind of filter. If the copyright holders of these shows are looking to get these taken off of (or perhaps license) YouTube, etc. they might be smart to take advantage of the site, which should help them narrow down directly to their content on the actual video sharing sites.
In the meantime, Lovely Anime seems to be a good resource for people looking to get their anime fix online, all in one focused site.
The Constable on January 19th, 2009
