Lawrence Lessig’s presentation last Thursday at OVA’s first Wireside Chat was a huge success. Over 3,000 unique visitors tuned in, plus hundreds more watched at over 40 local screening events. But since Lessig’s slidecast of the 45-minute talk contained 15-second clips of copyrighted music by Warner Music Group, the YouTube version was literally silenced!
Lessig’s talk—in case you missed it—was about, of all things, the importance of fair use and current copyright issues. His presentation was highly critical and thoroughly educational—as TechDirt put it, “There could be no clearer example of fair use.” But yesterday, the YouTube-hosted video was scrubbed of its audio track, rendering the presentation useless. (The talk has since been restored, and remains available at Lessig’s blip.tv page—highlighting the importance of a broad, diverse video ecosystem without single points of failure.)
It’s still unclear whether the takedown was the result of a DMCA request or due to YouTube’s ContentID system, which automatically scans videos for copyrighted material and takes action. Luckily, Lessig has legal expertise and counternotice know-how. He filed a counterclaim informing YouTube that his video on fair use was, in fact, fair use. It doesn’t matter why the video was taken down; the lack of human review is no excuse for a serious flaw in the way YouTube handles copyright complaints.
Fair use, a doctrine in US law that allows for short transformative uses of copyrighted works, lies not only at the heart of remix culture, but also education, news, commentary, and criticism. When YouTube utilizes filtering systems like ContentID, or when media companies improperly take advantage of the DMCA, important expression is stifled. We constantly see examples of fair users being shut down; this policy of guilty-before-proven-innocent runs counter to the internet’s foundational values of freedom and openness.
We need to run with this. The fact that a video about fair use would be taken down for copyright infringement is bad press for YouTube, bad press for WMG, and bad press especially for the legal and technical system we have in place today. The importance of pushing to fix these flaws and create an open video ecosystem has never been stronger.
[...] Irony: Wireside Chat with Lawrence Lessig Silenced by Copyright. [...]
[...] Silences, Then Restores Lessig Presentation YouTube briefly blocked the audio track of a presentation given by Stanford Law Professor Lawrence Lessig yesterday, informing users that the clip contained [...]
I suggest posting the original Ogg Theora + Vorbis file to archive.org. I don’t believe they will censor your upload. They will host it at no charge and you can link directly to uploaded files (I suggest linking to the “download” URL instead of a URL that points to a specific IA machine in order to maintain working links as IA does its internal bookkeeping).
[...] after the presentation was uploaded to Lessig’s official YouTube account, the audio track was removed by which seems to be YouTube’s new Content ID system or by a DMCA request. The full presentation [...]
[...] a few clips of copyrighted music, the audio was stripped from the presentation. Check out OPV’s blog for the full report on this ironic [...]
[...] Quando postaram a gravação da apresentação de Lessig no Youtube, os 42 minutos de áudio foram censurados porque o vídeo utilizava 15 segundos de material em copyright da Warner Music, como foi reportado no openvideoalliance.org [...]
[...] proprio sito ufficiale, la Open Video Alliance ha poi precisato di non essere a conoscenza delle dinamiche effettive di rimozione da parte di YouTube. In pratica, [...]
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