Scattered Work

YouTube: “Three Strikes and You’re Out”

Nate Anderson at Ars Technica covers what is probably the best cause célèbre I’ve seen for oponents of restrictive copyright enforcement. The article recounts the case of Kevin Lee, a prolific film blogger who used YouTube extensively to publish “video essays” which interspersed his own critical insights with short film clips. Lee’s work demonstrates everything that’s good and noble about the Internet: an unpaid blogger pioneering new avenues of critical discourse, just to share his love of cinema with others. His blog, Shooting Down Pictures, reveals a passionate, intelligent observer documenting his travels through the greatest 1,000 films. Read more about the significance of Lee’s work at The House Next Door.

But all this came to a grinding halt when, after a third DMCA takedown notice was served against Lee, over five hours of his critical commentary was deleted by YouTube and his account closed. I’ve written about what I see as some helpful innovations on YouTube’s part in dealing with copyright, but this “three strikes” rule is absurd on its face. YouTube offers some fair objections to the idea that it should manually review all of these takedown notices, but deleting whole user accounts due to a small ammount of allegedly infringing content is bad for YouTube, bad for free speech, and will ultimately feed the backlash against copyright in general. It’s not even clear that the video that triggered the account deletion was violating copyright; Lee has a strong case that his critical videos fall under fair use protections.

The blame for this doesn’t fall entirely on YouTube, as many of the large rights holders are taking a “shoot first, ask questions later” stance with takedown notices, and of course the DMCA itself encourages this behavior. Any lasting solution will involve a combination of legal reform and consumers creating a shitstorm whenever something like this happens.

[Cross-posted at Emvergeoning]

Tags: copyright, DMCA, fair use, Kevin Lee, YouTube

YouTube and Copyright

YouTube has always had a complex relationship with copyright laws. While the quality of user-generated content for the video-sharing website has always been inconsistent, it was catapulted to popularity largely by virtue of widespread copyright violation on the part of its users. As YouTube weathers lawsuits over this fact, it has also been developing a solution that, to some extent, will allow it to have its cake and eat it too. Google (which acquired YouTube in 2006) has been rolling out a “fingerprint” technology that allows it to automatically find infringing material. What’s interesting about this technology is what YouTube does when it finds the copyright violators.

Recently a friend of mine was unable to post a video because YouTube had determined, automatically, that it used a copyrighted song for the soundtrack. But this is just one possible course of action. A few days ago I received an email letting me know that a video I had posted back in July contains copyrighted material (Donna Summer’s “If You Got It Flaunt It”). But rather than deleting the video, YouTube informed me that the copyright holder (UMG) had opted to leave the content on the site, but will apparently be collecting royalties from advertising shown on the video’s page (read more about the system here).

This policy strikes me as a sensible solution to the problem YouTube faces, and an encouraging sign that we can enforce copyright while also allowing for creative reuse of existing art. Of course this strategy depends on a distribution system that has an incentive to encourage this kind of reuse and an incentive to protect copyright holder’s rights. In many situations, these incentives won’t exist. But the more prevalent they become, the more comfortable people will be with the “free” exchange of culture.

Tags: copyright, Google, licenses, YouTube