So where's a link to the video? I'm digging and will update if I find it.
Edit: The following link seems to match many of the attributes mentioned in the complaint filed (date of talk, sponsor of talk, his keynote speaker status, location of talk, video length).
Edit2: Confirmed. This is the talk. The Ars article says the title of the talk was "Open," same as the title in the video. The "infringement" starts around 37:40. Funnily enough, the "infringed work" is apparently a remix itself. Go figure. You couldn't make this stuff up.
Edit3: I can't tell whether the song itself is a remix, or if Lessig meant there were several remixes of the original clip that had the music dubbed over clips from The Breakfast Club. It appears to be the latter.
Suffice it to say, this is fucking ridiculous. Raise your hand if you're going to watch a 49 minute long video in order to try and "home tape" the 47 second clip 37 minutes and 40 seconds in, especially if you can just download the official video from here:
Whether this is "official" as in this is the actual video shot for the song, or "official" as in "welovephoenix" is their official youtube channel (or both), I don't know. But that link has nearly 10 million views.
Edit4:
And this is the original video remixing the song with The Breakfast Club and another 80s movie I'm too twentysomething to recognize, sitting pretty at 458k views:
I know, but I'm guessing that the recently-posted video of his that got the takedown notice is a cleaned up version of the video I linked. I'm currently trying to dig through the talk at the moment to get to the supposedly infringing bits.
I'd suggest clicking "Show More" underneath the description to see the numerous remixes for other localities that have been made.
Also, I found this quote in the description:
>Update 1: We met with Glassnote Records and they loved it! They said Phoenix dug it too!
Digging around, it seems Glassnote records is an American label, and Liberation Music is an Australian label. From what I can tell, it seems that Glassnote records hold the rights to the song, and Phoenix is under the Glassnote label:
Does Liberation Music have a distribution deal with Glassnote? Is one a subsidiary of the other? Now I don't even know if Liberation Music actually had standing to file a DMCA claim at all. I should go to law school.
You'd think these DMCA blasters would have some lists of people they shouldn't tangle with because it will be more trouble than it's worth. Fortunately for us, apparently not.
Yeah, like when the NFL DMCA'd Wendy Seltzer's YT video of the NFL's copyright notice plus a short clip of a Super Bowl® ^W^W Sports Championship kickoff. http://wendy.seltzer.org/blog/dmca-nfl
Only 2 lawsuits have ever challenged a DMCA takedown? Then the DMCA is seriously broken. There needs to be a better path for appeal against excessive or unfair takedowns.
> Only 2 lawsuits have ever challenged a DMCA takedown?
How did you extrapolate a single organization (EFF) pursuing a few cases involving a subsection of the DMCA into a blanket statement covering all DMCA takedowns?
No, the article says that only a few lawsuits have resulted in damages per section 512(f) of the DMCA [1] (which places a penalty on knowingly misrepresenting a work when filing a DMCA notice against it, if I am reading correctly). It sounds like they're able to sue under 512(f) in this case because Liberation Music pressed the issue even after they had been notified that the use was fair use. I am not a lawyer, though.
So does that mean that in order to keep our work up we need to challenge every take down and invest thousands of dollars fighting it?
That is what is broken in the DMCA. Guilty until proven innocent and you the content creator (that uses some copyrighted material) have to pay for every bullshit take down notice you get.
This is what big companies are counting on, that you are not willing to invest the time and effort needed to challenge them.
And given that they have vastly more resources they will be better prepared to fight you that you are to fight them.
This is not justice this is survival of the richest.
In order to keep your work up, all you have to do is tell your provider that the takedown notice is incorrect, and they'll restore your content. I believe there's a mandated delay (10 days?) before they can do it, so it's still pretty bad, but you don't have to sue. You can sue for damages if you think they sent the takedown maliciously, but it's not required just to restore the content.
Which means unlimited free 10-day takedowns. They can throw them out on a whim at anything that even matches keywords, because there's no penalty for negligence, only direct maliciousness.
It's not hugely expensive to fight plain takedowns, but it's still a burden that shouldn't exist, and having your content down is a cost you'll never recover.
Some time ago I became engaged in the Syrian conflict, before it was a conflict.
There was a time when a multitude of cities rose up in peaceful demonstration. Civilian organizations took root to make clear cases for ways and means of reforms, both on the local and national scale. These local coordination committees were most publicly visible by foreigners on the net, being prolific in uploading of media, mainly during Friday protests after prayer. These local orgs, mainly teens, found sites like bambuser.com and youtube.com highly effective for disseminating and spreading word of solidarity for towns spread miles apart, those miles just may as well be worlds apart much like how it is in the US and other nations.
Well I helped disseminate these events, my favorite were those broadcast live on bambuser as it gave viewers a much more personal feeling for those demonstrating on the other end. Much respect to Hans Eriksson[1] who used his position at bambuser in a positive way, embracing these broadcasts and himself helping disseminate the broadcasts to the world.
These weekly mass demonstrations took a bloody turn, and while many stopped looking the coordination committees kept witness, services like bambuser kept showing live feeds even though they were turning increasing violent as Assad's forces began publicly gunning down crowds.
Ever see the GPS trail of someone fleeing with a crowd of his neighbors during a live broadcast, while they were being shot at? I have. Here is a profile of a martyr who fought with his camera to show the world his life[2].
What does this have to do with copyright? Well those early days of mass demonstrations are valuable evidence of the true origins of the Syrian civil war, peaceful defiance met with violence.
During my monitoring and dissemination of other people's hard fought media, I began processing some into panorama as the narrow field of view provided by handheld cams reduced much of the true impact of what the recorder meant to show to others. I made stitched images from video showing tanks awaiting a push into so-called 'infected' cities[3]. I made images of the days during the fraudulent elections, of BMPs chasing unarmed civilians through the streets[4]. Later, I've stitched together images of war crimes that I can never remove from my thoughts. After doing this for many images I had video of which I also processed and began uploading those of potential interest, video of Assad's troops hurling IEDs onto residential neighborhoods from helicopters for instance[5].
But the video that involves this discussion of copyright, is one held dear to many of the early activists. Held dear to many of those now deceased. It was a song sung by someone who himself, was killed in those early days of mass demonstrations.
Ibrahim Qashoush, a fireman and a poet from Hama Syria[6].
Ibrahim coined a song that became popular during these mass demonstrations in Hama, singing them in a multitude of breathtaking shows filled the entire town square (remember when towns had those?) with the families that lived there. Time passed, and after becoming depressed at the daily slaughter I decided to go back and make a stitched image[7] of that night in Hama, when Ibrahim sung before his throat was slit[8] for daring to sing.
After uploading the video to Youtube, marking the video as not copyrighted, then the image to imgur as usual I received a copyright complaint from CDBaby[9]. Apparently they thought that due to an artist of theirs including a sample of the protest audio, they retroactively owned the original protest song themselves.
I lodged a rebuttal saying that the video was clearly not theirs, and Youtube agreed. Attempts to contact CDBaby were futile. Having the copyright claim removed I was somewhat happy with the vindication that this dead man's song was indeed not CDBaby's, but infuriated that this company made ABSOLUTELY NO DUE DILIGENCE AS TO THEIR CLAIMS. Most of the time people, if they notice, can contact them saying a company like CD...
There is a lot of pain within me from the last few years, so many people I no longer have contact with, for most likely bad reasons. It felt good writing this out, thank you for reading.
Right now your comment seems to be at the bottom of the page.
Don't take that to mean nobody is reading.
I personally feel the same way about youtube writ large. Google has made youtube one of the greatest video libraries ever compiled. Downloading videos is not allowed by the software (No, various add ons and browser extensions are not acceptable.), and on top of that it's disallowed by their TOS.
I can only imagine the tragedy set to occur when youtube inevitably shuts down.
One of the most egregious examples I've seen thus far is on the older Tay Zonday videos where it says the license is creative commons but there is no way to download the video.
EDIT:
"
This MP3 is subject to a Creative Commons License. Creative Commons License Details:"
Interesting. Guess I didn't read close enough the first time.
It is at the bottom because it is a new account, it is a new account because HN ghosts accounts at the drop of a hat. Oh well.
My problem with the CDBaby/Youtube relationship is that CDBaby was essentially created to take advantage of blanket claims. Youtube's algos create a set of hashes or something of track audio. This is fine. The first to make a copyrighted claim, even if non-copyrighted uploads already exist, get precedence. This is not fine.
So the hundreds of copies of the man singing his heart out matter nothing once CDBaby uploads one copyrighted track that includes a part that matches. Copyrighted claims override the others for some horrific reason.
Leaving me to defend a dead man. Thanks to @ioerror, Telecomix and others for keeping it real respecting the dead's rights.
That's nice. It's fairly obvious CDBaby's mode of operation is what I have described. Looking into them after they obtained my attention resulted in finding many similar stories from others.
I have NEVER seen anything from CDBaby's presence with actual CD sales, be it in retail shops or online, on the other hand their mode of operation since starting to use Youtube indicates this is their main line of income.
"Represent" artists by claiming copyright on any under-protected samples that they may have used.
Including voice samples of men who have had their throats slit.
Force users dispute it on Youtube, disputed videos get resolved but every other copy of the media that was uploaded does not. Leaving each of the other users who uploaded to fight it one by one on their own. Blanket claims on swaths of video are made by CDBaby forcing individual defense from users for each of their uploaded copies. Not all users notice the copyright claims, not all care, even less have the motivation to try to set things right.
CDBaby over time gets claim to a larger and larger portfolio of media that doesn't belong to them.
It's all fairly obvious, regardless of how the original company started and operated.
That was a powerful story, and it's well written too. I think it would make a great article for Vice or something like that, but obviously it's nice to read posts like this on HN.
Words cannot convey what powerful feels like, these images were made from video filmed in a chaotic field hosptial: http://imgur.com/gallery/jFdBb
Some things I just cannot muster any bit of eloquence to describe. The best service I could think of was to help disseminate what others likely felt as they record.
For the record I mandated that CDBaby define the process for which they make copyright claims, how they handle due diligence for any preexisting media copyrighted or not. I mandated this after being shrugged off three times in a row, once during email correspondence with CDBaby support "manager."
Nothing was ever clarified.
I keep using "manager" in quotes because their lower support rep and the "manager" shared the same name..
Derek Sivers won't like it one bit when he sees how his creation is being abused. Have you tried going all the way to the top at CDBaby? (Derek is on HN by the way, but sold the company long ago).
DMCA needs be amended, badly. The automated DMCA takedown notices and with no repercussions for false infringements are making the copyright situation worse. These companies need to be punished for sending abusive DMCA notices.
While I hate the heavy-handedness that the DMCA operates with and I think it's ridiculous that LL's video was banned it's worth remembering back to pre-YouTube to recall how we got here.
Before YouTube there wasn't any consumer-accessible dissemination of AV media online. You had to have serious equipment, there was no social distribution and copyrighted material couldn't get used anywhere.
YouTube came along and simply overpowered the copyright holders with both sheer volume and variety of copyright infringements and followed through with the financial and legal muscle of Google behind it. There was a long time when it wasn't clear whether YouTube would actually survive its legal battle and I assume that the instant-take-downs were a compromise that was reached to allow them to continue.
I'm glad that Lawrence Lessig is fighting this case and it's a good time for it to happen. However it's also worth keeping in mind why these instant take-downs were instituted in the first place - it was (I presume) because it was the only way to placate copyright holders into allowing the whole thing to continue.
That's not quite 100% true - there were various sites that disseminated video to and from consumers. I ran one of them, Machinima.com, which was founded in 2000.
However, they were few, far between, and didn't work nearly as well as YouTube. I'll admit to making a massive mistake disregarding Flash video back in those days in favour of downloadable content!
YouTube really has been a remarkable thing - one of the few .coms that can genuninely claim to have significantly changed the world.
Before YouTube there wasn't any consumer-accessible dissemination of AV media online
Are we forgetting eBaum's World? Metacafe? Break (used to be Big-boys.com)? And of course right after YouTube came LiveLeak (from the same guys as Ogrish and I wouldn't touch that with a 10-foot pole).
eBaum's was fighting the copyright fight (and for less than honorable reasons) long before YouTube existed.
Yay! This is fun. Finally a company foolish enough to pick a fight with an expert in copyright that's been waiting for one for years.
Let's just hope the courts show a bit of common sense.
I wonder if they did any research before filing a DMCA against who they were poking with a pointy stick? Or whether it was just an auto-match and auto-DMCA filed?
Hopefully when this goes to the courts it'll set some precedents, I can't imagine Lessig backing down from a fight over a spurious DMCA claim.
32 comments
[ 37.3 ms ] story [ 1044 ms ] threadEdit: The following link seems to match many of the attributes mentioned in the complaint filed (date of talk, sponsor of talk, his keynote speaker status, location of talk, video length).
http://vimeo.com/13816922
http://youtu.be/KBTWoCaNKn4?t=37m41s
Edit2: Confirmed. This is the talk. The Ars article says the title of the talk was "Open," same as the title in the video. The "infringement" starts around 37:40. Funnily enough, the "infringed work" is apparently a remix itself. Go figure. You couldn't make this stuff up.
Edit3: I can't tell whether the song itself is a remix, or if Lessig meant there were several remixes of the original clip that had the music dubbed over clips from The Breakfast Club. It appears to be the latter.
Suffice it to say, this is fucking ridiculous. Raise your hand if you're going to watch a 49 minute long video in order to try and "home tape" the 47 second clip 37 minutes and 40 seconds in, especially if you can just download the official video from here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4BJDNw7o6so
Whether this is "official" as in this is the actual video shot for the song, or "official" as in "welovephoenix" is their official youtube channel (or both), I don't know. But that link has nearly 10 million views.
Edit4:
And this is the original video remixing the song with The Breakfast Club and another 80s movie I'm too twentysomething to recognize, sitting pretty at 458k views:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dq741YqlP7w
Not one, but several other movies, including at least Pretty In Pink, Footloose, and Mannequin.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U1ywFh2AZLg
I'd suggest clicking "Show More" underneath the description to see the numerous remixes for other localities that have been made.
Also, I found this quote in the description:
>Update 1: We met with Glassnote Records and they loved it! They said Phoenix dug it too!
Digging around, it seems Glassnote records is an American label, and Liberation Music is an Australian label. From what I can tell, it seems that Glassnote records hold the rights to the song, and Phoenix is under the Glassnote label:
http://glassnotemusic.com/profile/Phoenix
Does Liberation Music have a distribution deal with Glassnote? Is one a subsidiary of the other? Now I don't even know if Liberation Music actually had standing to file a DMCA claim at all. I should go to law school.
Edit: Even my hometown of Austin has one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LAM0rb8vswU .
[1] http://www.copyright.gov/title17/92chap5.html#512
That is what is broken in the DMCA. Guilty until proven innocent and you the content creator (that uses some copyrighted material) have to pay for every bullshit take down notice you get.
This is what big companies are counting on, that you are not willing to invest the time and effort needed to challenge them.
And given that they have vastly more resources they will be better prepared to fight you that you are to fight them.
This is not justice this is survival of the richest.
It's not hugely expensive to fight plain takedowns, but it's still a burden that shouldn't exist, and having your content down is a cost you'll never recover.
There was a time when a multitude of cities rose up in peaceful demonstration. Civilian organizations took root to make clear cases for ways and means of reforms, both on the local and national scale. These local coordination committees were most publicly visible by foreigners on the net, being prolific in uploading of media, mainly during Friday protests after prayer. These local orgs, mainly teens, found sites like bambuser.com and youtube.com highly effective for disseminating and spreading word of solidarity for towns spread miles apart, those miles just may as well be worlds apart much like how it is in the US and other nations.
Well I helped disseminate these events, my favorite were those broadcast live on bambuser as it gave viewers a much more personal feeling for those demonstrating on the other end. Much respect to Hans Eriksson[1] who used his position at bambuser in a positive way, embracing these broadcasts and himself helping disseminate the broadcasts to the world.
These weekly mass demonstrations took a bloody turn, and while many stopped looking the coordination committees kept witness, services like bambuser kept showing live feeds even though they were turning increasing violent as Assad's forces began publicly gunning down crowds.
Ever see the GPS trail of someone fleeing with a crowd of his neighbors during a live broadcast, while they were being shot at? I have. Here is a profile of a martyr who fought with his camera to show the world his life[2].
What does this have to do with copyright? Well those early days of mass demonstrations are valuable evidence of the true origins of the Syrian civil war, peaceful defiance met with violence.
During my monitoring and dissemination of other people's hard fought media, I began processing some into panorama as the narrow field of view provided by handheld cams reduced much of the true impact of what the recorder meant to show to others. I made stitched images from video showing tanks awaiting a push into so-called 'infected' cities[3]. I made images of the days during the fraudulent elections, of BMPs chasing unarmed civilians through the streets[4]. Later, I've stitched together images of war crimes that I can never remove from my thoughts. After doing this for many images I had video of which I also processed and began uploading those of potential interest, video of Assad's troops hurling IEDs onto residential neighborhoods from helicopters for instance[5].
But the video that involves this discussion of copyright, is one held dear to many of the early activists. Held dear to many of those now deceased. It was a song sung by someone who himself, was killed in those early days of mass demonstrations.
Ibrahim Qashoush, a fireman and a poet from Hama Syria[6].
Ibrahim coined a song that became popular during these mass demonstrations in Hama, singing them in a multitude of breathtaking shows filled the entire town square (remember when towns had those?) with the families that lived there. Time passed, and after becoming depressed at the daily slaughter I decided to go back and make a stitched image[7] of that night in Hama, when Ibrahim sung before his throat was slit[8] for daring to sing.
After uploading the video to Youtube, marking the video as not copyrighted, then the image to imgur as usual I received a copyright complaint from CDBaby[9]. Apparently they thought that due to an artist of theirs including a sample of the protest audio, they retroactively owned the original protest song themselves.
I lodged a rebuttal saying that the video was clearly not theirs, and Youtube agreed. Attempts to contact CDBaby were futile. Having the copyright claim removed I was somewhat happy with the vindication that this dead man's song was indeed not CDBaby's, but infuriated that this company made ABSOLUTELY NO DUE DILIGENCE AS TO THEIR CLAIMS. Most of the time people, if they notice, can contact them saying a company like CD...
Don't take that to mean nobody is reading.
I personally feel the same way about youtube writ large. Google has made youtube one of the greatest video libraries ever compiled. Downloading videos is not allowed by the software (No, various add ons and browser extensions are not acceptable.), and on top of that it's disallowed by their TOS.
I can only imagine the tragedy set to occur when youtube inevitably shuts down.
One of the most egregious examples I've seen thus far is on the older Tay Zonday videos where it says the license is creative commons but there is no way to download the video.
EDIT:
" This MP3 is subject to a Creative Commons License. Creative Commons License Details:"
Interesting. Guess I didn't read close enough the first time.
My problem with the CDBaby/Youtube relationship is that CDBaby was essentially created to take advantage of blanket claims. Youtube's algos create a set of hashes or something of track audio. This is fine. The first to make a copyrighted claim, even if non-copyrighted uploads already exist, get precedence. This is not fine.
So the hundreds of copies of the man singing his heart out matter nothing once CDBaby uploads one copyrighted track that includes a part that matches. Copyrighted claims override the others for some horrific reason.
Leaving me to defend a dead man. Thanks to @ioerror, Telecomix and others for keeping it real respecting the dead's rights.
I have NEVER seen anything from CDBaby's presence with actual CD sales, be it in retail shops or online, on the other hand their mode of operation since starting to use Youtube indicates this is their main line of income.
"Represent" artists by claiming copyright on any under-protected samples that they may have used.
Including voice samples of men who have had their throats slit.
Force users dispute it on Youtube, disputed videos get resolved but every other copy of the media that was uploaded does not. Leaving each of the other users who uploaded to fight it one by one on their own. Blanket claims on swaths of video are made by CDBaby forcing individual defense from users for each of their uploaded copies. Not all users notice the copyright claims, not all care, even less have the motivation to try to set things right.
CDBaby over time gets claim to a larger and larger portfolio of media that doesn't belong to them.
It's all fairly obvious, regardless of how the original company started and operated.
Some things I just cannot muster any bit of eloquence to describe. The best service I could think of was to help disseminate what others likely felt as they record.
Nothing was ever clarified.
I keep using "manager" in quotes because their lower support rep and the "manager" shared the same name..
Before YouTube there wasn't any consumer-accessible dissemination of AV media online. You had to have serious equipment, there was no social distribution and copyrighted material couldn't get used anywhere.
YouTube came along and simply overpowered the copyright holders with both sheer volume and variety of copyright infringements and followed through with the financial and legal muscle of Google behind it. There was a long time when it wasn't clear whether YouTube would actually survive its legal battle and I assume that the instant-take-downs were a compromise that was reached to allow them to continue.
I'm glad that Lawrence Lessig is fighting this case and it's a good time for it to happen. However it's also worth keeping in mind why these instant take-downs were instituted in the first place - it was (I presume) because it was the only way to placate copyright holders into allowing the whole thing to continue.
However, they were few, far between, and didn't work nearly as well as YouTube. I'll admit to making a massive mistake disregarding Flash video back in those days in favour of downloadable content!
YouTube really has been a remarkable thing - one of the few .coms that can genuninely claim to have significantly changed the world.
eBaum's was fighting the copyright fight (and for less than honorable reasons) long before YouTube existed.
Hopefully when this goes to the courts it'll set some precedents, I can't imagine Lessig backing down from a fight over a spurious DMCA claim.