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Comment by tensafefrogs | Hacker News Reader

This blog post is very misinformed. "YouTube" did not take down the videos. The copyright owner requested that they be removed.

The blog post seems to think that YouTube/Google should fight for the people who created/uploaded these parodies, but that's not YouTube's place.

If the owner/uploader of a parody wants to contest the takedown, they can do so (it's pretty easy to contest it if one of your videos is taken down due to this). The real problem is the copyright law is fuzzy when it comes to "fair use" and many people aren't willing to risk an expensive lawsuit just to keep a video on YouTube.

So send an angry letter to your congressman, not YouTube.

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I don't have a congressman. It's all too easy to think that this is an American thing, but Youtube is a worldwide site, and hundreds of millions of people are not in a position to do anything about this.

edit: parodies are legally protected and if youtube is willing to profit of these things they should be willing to defend them.

If the removal was automated (which is definitely a possibility) then youtube should do a better job because clearly going by sound track or a significant part of the image alone is going to remove all kinds of stuff that have a legal status that is different than an actual copy.

And this would be protected if it was a parody of Downfall - what isn't protected is using a third party's work to parody something.

It's like the difference between a protest at city hall and a protest at the car dealer because they wont drive you to city hall.

The source the article cites [1] contains this sentence:

These videos were blocked by YouTube’s Content ID system, not taken down via DMCA notices

This probably means that neither YouTube nor Constantin Films took any active steps to take down the video. It was probably all automatic through content fingerprints.

It works like this: Content providers, e.g. Constantin Films, create fingerprints for their catalogue with a fingerprinting service, e.g. Audible Magic. Sites with user generated content e.g. YouTube check any uploaded content for a matching fingerprint. If anything gets identified as copyrighted content it gets blocked. I work at a video platform, and this is how we deal with copyrighted content.

Usually, this happens during upload, my guess is that YouTube started to use such a service at some point and now cleans their content, which takes some time.

I think the parodies are only collateral damage. One more reason to reform copyright.

http://openvideoalliance.org/2010/04/hitler-downfall-meme-ge...

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