Sigh.. while I actually support what Greenpeace did here, were the clips from the official broadcast (which makes it understandable that they got pulled) or was it someone's original footage (which would be less ok).
It does look like a massive bait, I can't imagine why google would have pulled these videos if it were not for licensing issues or similar. I don't buy the massive pro-oil conspiracy TFA hints at.
As much as I'd love to see Shell and many other oil companies get a huge downsizing, this is some pretty onerous lying.
Google didn't "censor" anything, they complied with a DMCA request to take down the videos. It isn't because it's anti-oil, it's because it's copyrighted material.
There's a fair argument to be made about how idiotic the DMCA is, but shits the law in Google's world.
Still, it does points to a fundamental flaw of centralized services such as YouTube.
If people had symmetric bandwidth to begin with, had their own web site, and distributed their bigger files (such as videos) through a a peer-to-peer publication protocol (such as bit-torrent), then things such as DMCA would cause no problem.
Now, we would still need aggregators and search engines. But those only point the way, which is even harder to prevent.
The camera is shaky, leading me to believe this was filmed by someone in the audience working with Greenpeace, so to the extent that there is copyright in the cinematographic aspects of the video, the copyright would belong to Greenpeace or to the director (who was probably also the camera operator). (Which would depend on the relationship between those two).
That leaves the issue of copyright in what they were recording. The only element I see of that which has a good chance of being copyrighted is the music and the performance of the music. Neither of these seem likely to be Shell.
The ceremony itself could be considered a choreographic work, but I don't think (at least in the US) that it would qualify for copyright under the Feist v. Rural Telephone standard. In that case, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of an accused infringer who had literally copied the white pages of a phone book. The Court said that it is a Constitutional requirement that there be creativity in a work for it to be copyrightable, and that taking a list of customers and ordering them alphabetically is not creative enough. I'd expect that taking a line of winners and having them stand on a platform while music plays fails in a similar way to be sufficiently creative to support copyright.
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[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 46.2 ms ] threadHere[1] is the link directly to the video/gp page
[1]http://www.greenpeace.org.uk/blog/climate/banned-video-our-s...
Google didn't "censor" anything, they complied with a DMCA request to take down the videos. It isn't because it's anti-oil, it's because it's copyrighted material.
There's a fair argument to be made about how idiotic the DMCA is, but shits the law in Google's world.
If people had symmetric bandwidth to begin with, had their own web site, and distributed their bigger files (such as videos) through a a peer-to-peer publication protocol (such as bit-torrent), then things such as DMCA would cause no problem.
Now, we would still need aggregators and search engines. But those only point the way, which is even harder to prevent.
The camera is shaky, leading me to believe this was filmed by someone in the audience working with Greenpeace, so to the extent that there is copyright in the cinematographic aspects of the video, the copyright would belong to Greenpeace or to the director (who was probably also the camera operator). (Which would depend on the relationship between those two).
That leaves the issue of copyright in what they were recording. The only element I see of that which has a good chance of being copyrighted is the music and the performance of the music. Neither of these seem likely to be Shell.
The ceremony itself could be considered a choreographic work, but I don't think (at least in the US) that it would qualify for copyright under the Feist v. Rural Telephone standard. In that case, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of an accused infringer who had literally copied the white pages of a phone book. The Court said that it is a Constitutional requirement that there be creativity in a work for it to be copyrightable, and that taking a list of customers and ordering them alphabetically is not creative enough. I'd expect that taking a line of winners and having them stand on a platform while music plays fails in a similar way to be sufficiently creative to support copyright.