Copyright Law Blog

Why Do Videos Get Removed From Youtube?

August 4th, 2009 at 12:39pm Under copyright infringement

Ever wonder why videos get removed from YouTube? We took a large random sample of videos from our YouTube index, and gathered some interesting statistics on what was removed and why.

At Webmunism.com we index over a million videos from popular video sharing site YouTube. Because videos get removed, we also check periodically to see which ones are still there. Out of scientific curiosity, we took a random sample of over 20,000 videos known to have existed in our index (20,811 videos to be exact).

Of these, 89 percent of the videos were still up, with 11 percent having been removed for various reasons.

There are 3 main reasons YouTube give for the removal of videos. We checked the 2,134 removed videos to determine what percentage were removed for each reason, giving the results below.48% – Removed by the user

This means the video was removed voluntarily by the person who uploaded it. There could be any number of reasons for doing this. Maybe they produced and uploaded a better version, or maybe they just got tired of it.41% – Removed due to terms of use violation

This means the video was removed at the initiative of YouTube staff, because it breached the YouTube terms of use in some way. It might have contained obscene, pornographic or otherwise unacceptable content. I think – but I can’t be sure of this – that it might also include some copyright issues. In this case it’s likely that the video was removed before a formal takedown notice was issued.11% – Removed at the request of the copyright owner

The dreaded DMCA takedown notice or its equivalent. This means that YouTube were served with a request to remove the video on the grounds of copyright, and complied with that request.

Clearly DMCA notices aren’t the most common reason videos are removed from YouTube, it’s more likely for a user to remove a video of their own accord. However, it’s still a statistic to give you pause, when you consider that (if our sample is representative) just over 1 in 10 videos that disappear from YouTube, do so as a result of copyright infringement notices.

If there’s enough interest, we may put up a page on Webmunism.com to track these statistics in (semi) real time.

Youtube in Trouble for 24 Television Show Postings

July 28th, 2009 at 12:35am Under copyright act

Given this fact, you can imagine how unhappy Fox was to learn that the first episode of 24 this season was posted on YouTube before the premier was shown!

To say that Fox executives much be unhappy is a slight understatement. Talk about stealing the winds out of the channel’s sails! One of the biggest nights for the show was pre-empted! Well, Fox isn’t taking the situation laying down.

On January 18th, Fox petitioned a California court one the matter. The court issued a subpoena to YouTube to find out who the posting part is. The subpoena is based on a claim of a violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. At this time, neither YouTube nor Google has indicated what steps they will take in response.

At this point, it is unclear whether Fox will actually sue YouTube for allowing the posting. Traditionally, YouTube has reacted to such complaints by removing the offending content. In this case, however, the horse is already out of the barn. The posting arguably spoiled the premier of the show, a big money maker for Fox.

Further confusing the situation is the presence of Google. Google has a history of fighting such subpoenas. It will be interesting to see if it imposes this theory on YouTube. Doing so would seem dubious since it would probably result in Fox bring a claim.

Ultimately, this situation simply portends further problems down the line for YouTube and Google. As these postings happen more and more, one can expect the artists and entertainment companies to eventually react as they did with the file sharing music situation. When will it happen? Who knows, but it should shake up the copyright field in a big way.

Dmca / Digital Millenium Copyright Act?

July 19th, 2009 at 04:23pm Under copyright act

Hi, I’m aware templates for this are on Google and other places. What I need to do though is have one made up for a specific situation. All that’s happened is that some friends of mine have had their personal pictures posted, without their authority on a website which is ridiculing all of us.
The webhosts have (for all our efforts) been completely useless at helping, now to the point of stubbornly saying they’re not taking any of these stolen pictures down.
I need to make a valid DMCA tailored for reporting stolen pictures, to send to this webhost, in the hopes they finally comply. 3 of my friends claim they own the original copies of their stolen pictures.
My plan is to send all of these friends the laid out template for this DMCA, for them to individually fax to this webhost.
Unfortunately none of us can afford a lawyer (individually), which is why I’ve come here to ask for any help out there.
Please can anyone help?

Simple Version Of Dmca — Digital Millennium Copyright Act?

July 18th, 2009 at 04:24am Under copyright act

Hi
Can you please give me a simplified version of the DMCA.
What is illegal and what is legal with sharing music files in particular.

Media Piracy and Law Enforcement

July 15th, 2009 at 06:40pm Under copyright law

Once upon a time, music played for free on the radio. And you could record a cassette if you wanted to, and you could listen to it as many times as you wanted to, and nobody thought you were a pirate if you shared it with your friends. In fact, this was seen as a way for new bands to break into the market; quite frequently receiving a mix tape would be motivation to buy the album of the band whose song was included.
What little concern there was over music piracy was restricted to “bootleg” tapes made at concerts. Even one of the most outspokenly liberal musicians ever, Frank Zappa, vented in vain at bootleg tapes of his music. He went so far as to include the tape of an interview expressing his anger with this practice at the beginning of his “As An Am” album, part of his “Beat the Boots” project. But even at its most vampiric, the bootleg recording industry was hardly able to suck off more than a single-digit percentage of profits.
But then the Internet happened. And suddenly, through it, the sharing of a home-made recording suddenly became something you could provide to thousands of people instead of one or two friends. Where even the recording of several purchased CDs onto cassette tape was only moderately a big deal before, now it is a major industry.
The media piracy issue is one of the most vitriolic hot-button issues in today’s Internet culture. The major factors being:
* The RIAA. The Recording Industry Association of America may live on in history as being one of the most ineffective measures of copyright protection the world has ever seen. Its methods have been draconian, never once catching a pirate, but relentlessly pursuing everyone from soccer moms to grandmothers to even dead people with a lawsuit for receiving a pirated tune, which in and of itself is not even a crime. Funded by the not-particularly successful record labels and armed with a battalion of lawyers, the RIAA’s practices have so far been futile at stopping piracy and harassing of legitamate users.
* Sony – became the laughing stock of 2006 with the Rootkit Fiasco. Sony included a malicious program on several music CDs, which installed a computer program called a “rootkit” on any computer you stuck them into, for the purposes of preventing unauthorized copying. The attempt backfired two ways: not only did it do nothing to prevent copying, but it crippled the software on the computer by compromising its security layer; any hacker looking to break into a computer need only look for the rootkit and they were in! Sony faced consumer lawsuits for this attempt and had to distribute an uninstaller for the rootkit, which itself was another botch in that it introduced more security holes into the system after patching its own rootkit. Sony lost millions of customers with this fiasco, many of whom swore publicly that they would never trust Sony again.
* The DMCA. The Digital Millennium Copyright Act is the United States copyright law which both criminalizes production and dissemination of technology, devices, or services that are used to circumvent measures that control access to copyrighted works and criminalizes the act of circumventing an access control, even when there is no infringement of copyright itself. This law has since endured no end to controversy, and is in the process of being reformed. The DMCA is said to be anti-competitive; because it gives copyright holders and the technology companies (including the ones convicted of monopolistic practices under anti-trust laws) that distribute their content the legal power to create closed technology platforms and exclude competitors from inter-operating with them. Once again, DRM technologies are clumsy and ineffective; they inconvenience legitimate users but do nothing to stop pirates.
The whole problem with copyright protection stems from the haziness of defining at what point someone has broken the law. Say I bought an album on tape cassette, brought it home, and played it on my stereo so that my whole family can hear it. I’m not a pirate yet. I upgraded my stereo to a new model and copied that album to a compact disk so that my new stereo can play it. Obviously, I haven’t stolen anything here, but now I might be breaking a law intended to stop me from copying it for piracy purposes. If I play it so my whole family can hear it in the living room, that should be no different from if I made a separate CD copy for each member of my family so they can all listen to it in their bedrooms with their headphones on. Am I a pirate now?
The further problem is that digital protections against copyright are platform and player-specific. There has been a whole quagmire of different devices such as the Apple iPod, Microsoft Zune, handheld game consoles, cell phones, and other devices capable of recording, storing, and playing back music. These features are sold to us as benefits of the device, and yet when we get them home we find that we have to pay for the song some six times to be able to listen to it on each device – if indeed (as is seldom the case) the song has even been ported to that platform! Subscribing to a DRM-protected device further restricts the user’s freedom to switch to a different device – you’re locked in, and would be breaking the law if you moved the media from one device to another – even if you, yourself, wrote and recorded that song at home!
The turmoil over media piracy isn’t likely to end any time soon. Fortunately, the legal system has so far left the enforcement of copyright concerns to private industry, which isn’t doing such a hot job of enforcing copyright anyway. Consider that any country in the world can host any media pirate and in fact several countries do just that, with no laws to stop them. Pirated media is very big business in some countries, not because they want to steal, but simply because they want that media to play on their own independently produced digital devices. Remember when you could just buy a record and drop it on any record player and it would just play?

In 1998 Congress Passed The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (dmca). ?

July 14th, 2009 at 04:23pm Under copyright act

In 1998 Congress passed the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). This legislation had an impact on Internet Service Providers. It affected them in the following way:
1. it created a “safe harbor” protecting them from certain copyright infringement claims.
2. it created a “safe harbor” protecting them from prosecution under federal child pornography statutes.
3. it expanded the “fair use” privileges available to Internet Service Providers.
4. it made certain forms of encryption illegal, because they violated the public’s rights under the “fair use” rule.

How To Copyright Your Own Work

July 12th, 2009 at 12:35am Under copyright act

   Recently, one of my articles was placed on a site without proper credits. It was brought to my attention by another article submission site. I had submitted my article to them for posting, when to my shock; they informed me that someone else was claiming ownership of my work! After contacting the potential plagiarizing site, my article was immediately given the proper credit with an apology from the owner of the site. It appears as though the owner of the site lets bloggers place what they will on the site without too much concern. He now knows just what a serious problem that can be and is taking steps to enforce blogs to respect author copyright.   This has happened before, which may be indicative of good writing content, but I won’t laud my own work. Not too much anyway. What this does bring to mind is just how to copyright your own work. Copyright is an automatic result of anyone placing any original content on the Internet. Behold the key word – “original”.   Proving originality can be difficult. This is why there are sites that will act as third party logistics and hold your copyrighted material until you need proof. The problem with these sites is that they charge between $150 and $300 and if they go out of business some years down the road, well you are just out of luck and the money paid.   So, my solution to this problem is to email your original copy to yourself, before submitting it to any site.  Once you have your emailed copy, save it to a folder marked ‘copyright’.  You can open this folder at any time and select an emailed article to show proof of your ownership, since the mailers are time stamped and cannot be edited.  The copyright folder also holds the time stamp of when you placed the article in the folder and you can snapshot ( simply press ‘print screen’ on your keyboard ) a picture of that for more proof, if need be.  Just remember to take a copy of your article from the copyright folder when sending it to someone as proof.   This is a quick and fairly good copyright. It is not a legal copyright, but it is proof to any server that you are the original owner of the questionable material, since anyone else will not have a timestamp preceding yours.    The DMCA ( The Digital Millennium Copyright Act ) makes it mandatory that each server becomes the stopgap for copyright infringement. That is, they are responsible to police their clients and if they don’t comply they can be held responsible by a court of law.    Copyright infringement is a felony; so don’t let anyone steal your work. If Google or any advertiser finds out a site is plagiarizing other people’s material, they will drop them like a hot potato! So, stand your ground and make sure everyone knows you are the author of your work.

Dmca Copyright Act… And Unlocking Cell Phones?

July 11th, 2009 at 04:23am Under copyright act

I know that the DMCA Copyright Act exempts the acts of unlocking cell phones until Nov. 2009.
What about the unlocked cell phones that manufacturers make and sell? For example, TigerDirect sells unlocked cell phones but does not unlock them. Does this Copyright Act apply to them next year, and they will no longer be able to sell unlocked phones?
Or does this Act solely apply to the act of unlocking locked cell phones…?
Thanks!