digital millennium copyright act

Chris Knight's avatar

Click here for “The Home Video Prince Doesn’t Want You To See”, a story on the ABC News website. It’s about Prince, AKA The Artist Formerly Known As The Artist Formerly Known As Prince, scouring the Internet for “copyright infringement”. The Lenzes, a family in Pennsylvania, had a video of their 18-month old son Holden on YouTube. The clip is only a few seconds long, but in the background you can hear Prince’s song “Let’s Go Crazy”.

That was plenty enough for Prince to have YouTube yank the family’s video.

Well, little Holden’s mom Stephanie Lenz fought back and filed a DMCA counter-notification claim through YouTube against Universal Music Publishing Group – which is Prince’s label – and their claim of copyright infringement. A few weeks later the video was back up.

And somehow, my similar recent situation with Viacom was brought into the discussion…

Caught to

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Chris Knight's avatar

You’ve probably heard about how some people are taking their new iPhones and hacking them so that they can use carriers other than AT&T, run “third-party” software not approved by Apple, etc. Many or most (maybe all) of these folks are suddenly lugging around very expensive “bricks”, because this week Apple released an update for the iPhone that is disabling such modified phones.

I took a looksee through the licensing agreement for the iPhone. The thing is Digital Rights Management from Hell. From my understanding of the agreement, buying and using an iPhone is lifetime indentured loyalty to AT&T, if you want to keep using it. That’s beyond the initial two-year service agreement.

In light of my own recent experience with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, it sure looks like Apple saw the rights afforded to people by the DMCA if they attempted to circumvent the software and contract, ...

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Chris Knight's avatar

Because a lot of people have expressed interest in this, and because I haven’t been able to see any reason to withhold this info at this point, here is the Digital Millennium Copyright Act counter-notification claim that I submitted to YouTube.

(And in case you don’t know what this is about, here’s the original post about my situation with Viacom over a YouTube clip that I had uploaded and here’s the post about its resolution.)

It all started with the following e-mail that I received from YouTube on the morning of August 29th, 2007:

Dear Member:

This is to notify you that we have removed or disabled access to the following material as a result of a third-party notification by Viacom International Inc. claiming that this material is infringing:

Web Junk 2.0 on VH1 features my school board commercial!:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ddyVQwpByug

Please Note: Repeat incidents of copyright infringement will result

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Chris Knight's avatar

It took quite awhile longer than I’d expected. This thing got around in a big way, what with The Wall Street Journal and Yahoo! and Slashdot and Ars Technica and seemingly a jillion more outlets that covered it. Lots of people wanted to weigh in on this and for sake of objectivity I’ve tried my best to include everyone that I could find that raised valid arguments about this issue, regardless of which side they took.

So here ya go: a (more or less) definitive reference to the published articles about the Christopher Knight/YouTube/Viacom incident.

SPECIAL MENTIONS

Kevin Nalty AKA “Nalts” himself provided commentary on the controversy early on with this nice video that I totally dug…

“Viacom’s copyright cops get carried away” – by Nick Ferrell for THE INQUIRER also deserves special recognition because this is the first time ever that I’ve been referred to as a “bloke”. Farrell

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Chris Knight's avatar

Early this morning Brian Sapient of the Rational Response Squad posted on the group’s site that YouTube had restored their account.

You might remember a few days ago when I wrote here about how the atheist Rational Response Squad had apparently been targeted by a Christian organization. Creation Science Evangelism Ministries allegedly filed “false DMCA copyright requests” against the Rational Response Squad with YouTube, and YouTube subsequently yanked Rational Response Squad’s account. But as you can see, it is now back up.

In the past few days since posting on this blog that I would “give the Rational Response Squad my full support in this matter”, plenty of e-mail has come into my box about that. A lot of the sentiment is reflected in the comments made on the earlier post. And many people are really, really angry that I took up sides with a group of atheists ...

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Chris Knight's avatar

Now that the Viacom/YouTube situation is behind me (I hope), I’m in the process of putting together a collection of the various published news stories/blog posts about it all: from the time it began to its resolution. And I’m also working on documenting the step-by-step process that I went through to contest it, including the full text of the counterclaim.

Suffice it to say, one of the things that has happened as a result of all this is that I’m now much more interested in digital copyright matters than I was before.

So this article on Slashdot caught my eye: a pro-atheist group called the Rational Response Squad has had its YouTube account terminated after an organization called Creation Science Evangelism Ministries allegedly flooded YouTube with “false DMCA copyright requests”. The termination apparently came after the Rational Response Squad tried to contest the copyright claims (I’m assuming this means that ...

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