YouTube’s Content ID Censorship Problem Illustrated | Electronic Frontier Foundation.
As I would have expected, the EFF has a great response to the Lessig-on-YouTube debacle. I’m glad they agree on the (strong) word “censorship.”
(0)Archive for the 'Copyright' Category
Bogus Copyright Claim Silences Yet Another Larry Lessig YouTube Presentation | Techdirt.
Lessig recently gave a “webside chat” on the usual issues of copyright and fair use that was posted to YouTube. The video included clips of music that is covered under copyright, but in this context appear to be fair use. The details aren’t immediately clear, but it seems that Google’s automatic copyright filters stripped the audio track from the video (though it is now available again — with a link to purchase the music featured in the video).
This is an incredibly timely coincidence with my last post about the censorship of digital speech. In this case, there wasn’t even a button to push–an automatic filter indiscriminately altered what Lessig had to say.
The democratization of web publishing, I believe, is an inherently good thing. It would be shameful if speech gets quashed because of a business extending its power over any medium it touches.
Techdirt isn’t usually a source I like to cite, but when Lessig tweets a story about himself, you know it must be legit.
World, get ready for the DMCA: ACTA’s Internet chapter leaks (Ars)
Ars offers an interesting interpretation of the leaked ACTA documents. They point out that it would be a globalization of what is already pretty established American law: ISPs are not liable for the infringing content of their subscribers, so long as they take the allegedly offending material offline. This would be a departure of the law of other countries.
Canadian law professor Michael Geist notes that the current draft would mean big changes for Canada. To take one example, Canada currently has no “takedown” law. Rather than “notice-and-takedown,” many ISPs rely on “notice-and-notice”—they pass notices along to the subscriber in question, but take no other action. But even this is not currently required by law.
What’s more, this would make bringing change to American law even more difficult. There have been plenty of cases where “notice and takedown” has not worked that well. Making it the default around the world wouldn’t be a good thing for us or them.
Copyright Reform Act tries fixing fair use with seven words.
In addition to “criticism” and “news reporting” and the rest of the items in the fair use preamble, the CRA proposes the addition of three more: “incidental uses, non-consumptive uses, and personal, non-commercial uses.”
This would be huge.
(0)Apple Banning iPhone Hackers from iTunes? | TiPb.
It appears as though Apple may be blocking known jailbreakers from iTunes. Considering the potential for piracy, this makes a bit of sense on Apple’s part, but seems a little heavy handed. I suppose if you want to tinker with a device, you should be ready for services to break.
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