EFF to Take Up Fair Use Fight Against YouTube - AppScout
The Electronic Frontier Foundation, no stranger to challenging the Web's power brokers, has offered its services to those who have posted videos to YouTube, only to have them removed for alleged copyright violations.
The tipping point? A teenager singing "Winter Wonderland", with lyrics by Felix Bernard, first published in 1934. Bye-bye.
Why the crackdown? "First, it appears that more and more copyright owners are using YouTube's automated copyright filtering system (known as the Content ID system), which tests all videos looking for a "match" with "fingerprints" provided by copyright owners, the EFF's Fred von Lohmann wrote in a blog post.
"Second, thanks to a recent spat between YouTube and Warner Music Group, YouTube's Content ID tool is now being used to censor lots and lots of videos (previously, Warner just silently shared in the advertising revenue for the videos that included a "match" to its music)," he added.
Von Lohmann said the automated Content ID system needs to be immediately fixed, implementing a policy shift that looks for a match between the audio and video track. If such a match isn't there, he argued, the video should stay. The EFF made this point in Oct. 2007, but no fix has been made, he said.
Because of that, von Lohmann argued, the EFF may step in. "Second, YouTubers, EFF wants to help. If Warner Music Group took down your video, ask yourself if your video is (1) noncommercial (i.e., no commercial advertisements or YouTube Partner videos) and (2) includes substantial original material contributed by you (i.e., no verbatim copies of Warner music videos)," he wrote. "If so, and you'd like to counternotice but are afraid of getting sued, we'd like to hear from you. We can't promise to take every case, but neither will we stand by and watch semi-automated takedowns trample fair use."
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