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.”
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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.
Wisconsin has become one of the first states to offer guidelines that judges can use to instruct jurors. I haven’t been able to find the guidelines online, but their announcement included another interesting tidbit.
The instruction does not, of course, help judges who are dealing with journalists and citizen bloggers in court. Live blogging during trials has raised concerns in Wisconsin and elsewhere. In mid January, a Florida judge ordered a Jacksonville newspaper reporter to stop blogging during a high-profile murder trial because the judge found the typing to be distracting the jury.
If trials are truly open to the public, what legitimate concern can their be for reporting on the judicial process?
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.
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