Sony sends copyright notices to TV Museum about shows 40 to 60 years old
torrentfreak.com
torrentfreak.com
I consume (and share) a lot of old video and I don't see this as a big loss since you can't enjoy the original works as they were intended to be.
I had a look at the channel and wondered why there was no true archival version provided by either:
1. The channel org itself via "Internet Archive" and/or torrents.
2. The community. It is trivial to create archival copies of youtube channels and most rare true archival footage on youtube will be mirrored elsewhere, even if "illegally".
(1) does not exist and (2) is non existent either, no one considers these encodes valuable enough to preserve, which does seem odd considering it is unique data.
Load up the videos, and you see a giant watermark, thus destroying any archival usage.
No one will fight for this channnel, no one will bother mirroring it, because every encode is ruined and flawed.
If the channel/org has the originals, consider talking to Internet Archive
The reason no one is mirroring these things isn't because of the watermarks: it is because all of this content was already just ephemera that most people consider trash in the first place. Hell: I care a lot about this stuff... but do I want to personally spend the money to carry it around forever? This is a lot of content that I will never personally watch much of. But is that because of the URL watermark? No.
(edit: Oh god... I started watching some of this stuff and realized it isn't just commercials but local Chicago news reporting on important historical topics and now I am in fact frantically archiving parts of the channel, though I am definitely doing so selectively; but like, they clearly themselves were uploading somewhat selectively, so the hit rate is higher than I had initially hoped even though it is still certainly a small fraction of the channel.)
Watermarks have their place, if you're the original creator, but to take works from others and slap your ad on it is pretty despicable (relatively).
It's like you've not been on the internet...never seen an imgflip&ifunny&etc&etc branded meme?
I prefer to watch (talking about video)> I mean those marketing vultures can call me whatever the fuck they want but I do not give a shit. I do not consume, I watch, read, eat, drink and so on.
I've released the project on GitHub but by doing so I am not implying it's good or worthy of others use. Maybe it will inspire smarter people to make something better.
But it works perfectly for me and my situation.
I’m not sure why folks seem to think that Youtube is a good place to archive anything - sure its a good distribution system, but time and time again we see that a handful of malicious actors can shut down entire channels with relative ease.
I would hope that these videos are backed up somewhere else on any of the many bulk cloud storage providers out there B2, AWS, Google cloud storage, etc. etc. etc. and could, with some effort be made available elsewhere than Youtube, or restored to the platform after the current storm dies down.
Analogies aside, I’m not against anyone using Youtube (or any other platform) for distribution - just that it absolutely should not be also used for your actual archive. There are much, much safer and better systems for that.
Replicate to preserve!
The idea is that the "stuff" is archived or stored properly which is much less of a burden. When it's desirable to do so public displays of it can be created.
What is prohibited by law is distribution of copyrighted works. You need permission or an appropriate license from the rightsholders concerned to distribute or otherwise perform a copyrighted work in public.
It is nearly always the latter that a lot of these so-called "archives" trip over. Everyone, including Big Corp, is fine with having their copyrighted works preserved.
Obligatory IANAL.
The idea that museums should have exhibitions and be open to the public was a later development.
> Don't play their game.
I don't think anyone wants to play their game. Alas, here we are rolling our dice again because hosted video platforms don't work without finding someone to host it.
Well you can argue that copyright shouldn't last 60 years, and I'd agree, but it does.
Just because you don't like the law, it doesn't mean you can break it without consequences.
The double jeopardy clause which enables jury nullification does not extend to civil law.
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jury_nullification which cites https://ia902506.us.archive.org/9/items/verdicts-of-conscien...
> In a civil trial, where the jury renders a verdict that is clearly at odds with the evidence, the judge can hand down judgment non obstante veredicto (JNOV) or order a new trial. Jury nullification is possible in a criminal context because once the defendant has been acquitted, and regardless of why he was acquitted, he cannot be tried again for the same offense. A consideration of the constitutionality of civil jury nullification is beyond the scope of this Note. See generally Lars Noah, Civil Jury Nullification, 86 Iowa L. Rev. 1601, 1601, 1626-57 (2001) (discussing legitimacy of jury nullification in civil cases and concluding that "the case in favor of civil jury nullification is much weaker than it is in the criminal arena.)
The primary reference is at https://heinonline.org/HOL/LandingPage?handle=hein.journals/... .
Even if jury nullification did apply, and you were lucky enough to get jurors who exercised that option, one clear consequence is going through the civil trial. You have no right to a public defender, so either you will need to pay for a (likely expensive) attorney, or deal with it on your own.
In the grandparent's example, the TV series is still available, and so the copyright holder could make a strong case for damages. If it's an otherwise unavailable news report about a specialist topic, it would be much harder to claim that any damages (such as loss of profits) was actually incurred.
The fact that YouTube can simply restrict access whenever they feel like it is of course tangential to the legality of distribution in general.
But all of these are examples of other people disliking a law. If the right other people dislike a law, you can ignore it. But whether you like it doesn't really play into it.
If executives can just decide which laws to enforce and which to ignore then we're partway down the road to dictatorship. Judges have the power to find that a law is unconstitutional, but not Presidents or Governors.
The methods the President chooses or doesn't choose to employ how to enforce the Controlled Substances Act seems to be more or less at their discretion in practice, and "we have limited resources and bigger fish to fry" seems to be a valid excuse, despite this being a judgement call at the whims of the executive branch.
This also doesn’t mean people will escape consequences, right? Broadly and statistically speaking, it’s extremely unlikely that breaking a law you don’t like will result in a trial that strikes the law down in your favor. I’d guess this might be especially true with copyright, since there is so much precedent - lots and lots of people have broken copyright and tried to fight it and lost. Why is this case any different?
The typical historical ‘example’ would be the jury finding a ‘white’ defendant not guilty of a clearly proven crime (murder, rape, battery, etc.)
A more modern example would be a jury finding a defendant not guilty of possession of marijuana even though the defendant obviously had MJ in their possession.
e.g.
> In 2021, six activists associated with the environmental protest organisation Extinction Rebellion were tried for causing criminal damage to the British headquarters of the multinational oil company Royal Dutch Shell. The judge told the jury that there was 'no defence in law' for the protestors' actions, which according to the prosecutor had caused 'significant damage' to the building, but the activists were acquitted
Further, 12 random people shouldn’t be able to flout democracy, and in fact judges are given a lot of discretion about what to do if a jury ignores law so blatantly.
Correct, they absolutely should not—in a working democracy.
The trouble is democracy isn't working when it comes to copyright, it never has. The 1886 Berne Convention was snuck in and locked in place before anyone realized what had happened. Big vested interests like Sony have had governments by the knackers ever since at everyone else's expense.
The question is how does the citizenry now regain control over its governance. Put another way, rule by multinational corporate interests isn't democracy.
See for example people who think it's fine to shoplift from stores because "they're big companies" or whatever.
> rule by multinational corporate interests isn't democracy.
The MPAA members, including Disney, Sony, AND netflix, have a combined value of $500b. Set aside netflix and that's $300b - 1/0th the size of a company like Google.
Now you might be right that large companies that rely on copyright for control are a danger, but if Sony is a big danger, what does that make Google or Apple.
Google, MS, Meta, Amazon and many others are exercising monopolistic power to the disadvantage of others. Put it this way, the small percentage of the population who are very wealthy shareholders and owners of these companies—powerful vested interests—have inflicted significant damage on our society by their control over government.
When the rich binge on getting richer and all others get poorer as a consequence and government does nothing about it then history tells us where that usually ends. One doesn't have to be Einstein to see our society is in a damn mess and it's getting worse.
Everyone is all for jury nullification until you get a few closet Klansmen on a jury 'nullifying' a dead-to-rights-guilty lynching trial.
Also, if I'm putting my life in the hands of 12 randos, I must be really, really, really 'down bad' (as the kids these days say).
There are stupid statutes, case law, and situations that nullification can protect the citizens from a potential overreach of government.
Under that opinion, is it equally fair to ignore the law and convict if someone committed some evil act but technically didn't break any law?
Highway cops might have discretion to let people off with a warning for minor violations, but the same discretion isn't supposed to let them punish people who are innocent. State governors have the power to grant pardons, but don't have the inverse power. And so on.
Law is not this simple. What the layperson understands as "the law" is what is written in statutes. To a lesser extent they understand case law is a thing. Case law is the interpretation of statutes by judges and juries ruling on cases. A judge or jury can "ignore" the law. By ignoring it, that becomes "the law".
"The law" is a matter of statutes, case law, prosecutor's opinion, judge's opinion, and popular opinion. As we age, we learn more about what is acceptable in society based on all these things.
Jury nullification can be a reflection of popular opinion. It is equally as flawed as any other aspect of society and government that forms "the law".
Judges have been known to set aside jury convictions when they believe the jury erred on the facts. They specifically give the jury instructions on the matter they’re supposed to decide.
Juries are supposed to decide matters of fact only, not matters of law. If the evidence shows that the defendant did not commit the act and the jury convicts anyway, it’ll either be set aside or overturned on appeal.
Of course sometimes people are wrongly convicted and punished of crimes, but that happens in every country and it’s always bad and must be fought against.
By what mechanism? The jury, as ultimate arbiters of fact, have identified that the defendant did commit the act.
The judge cannot set aside a verdict of innocent. If the jury declares you innocent, you are innocent and nothing can change that.
The judge can only set aside a verdict of guilty. This is a good thing! It protects people from a bad jury. I don’t know why this seems so surprising.
If you’re found guilty you also have the ability to appeal to a higher court. If your conviction is overturned on appeal then what did that mean? The judge at the appeals court overrode the decision of the jury. This is effectively the same thing as the trial judge setting aside a jury verdict, just with more procedure involved.
What happened on the night of March 17th?
Matters of law:
What does section 734.3 of the criminal code mean?
To be clear, only in civil cases. In criminal cases, there is no way to overturn JN.
Of course it's going to be taken off YouTube, the same as if Squid Game were uploaded.
Now if we're talking TV shows that were last place in viewership in the 1960's so nobody's bothered to sell/stream and haven't been syndicated in decades, then it's a totally different story...
Back in the days when you literally couldn't get the programs for love nor money (they were shown on US TV but weren't available globally for years), I'd often DCC them. I'd never claim that it was right.
I seem the same attitude from people who copy an article verbatim from a closed website that you have to subscribe to.
Because we end these sentences here, we are where we are.
> Just because you don't like the law, it doesn't mean you can break it without consequences.
Doubling down on the awful ending helps insure we stay here.
Instead, we could continue the thought into the broken systems that put us here. eg: Trading law for cash+favors.
However, laws aren't necessarily ethical and it's arguable that good citizens should refuse to obey unethical laws (e.g. it used to be illegal to harbour an escaped slave, or the Nazi Germany laws against Jews).
Personally, I think that media companies are harming the public by enforcing unnecessary old copyrights that they have no intention of re-distributing. We're going to end up with missing decades of TV/films that aren't popular enough to interest the copyright holder and that no-one had copies of.
I'm not sure that comparing having to pay a nominal amount for something that's trivially available with harbouring escaped slaves is the slam dunk you think it is, or why another company should profit from your reluctance to pay the creators.
I was making a general point about media companies and older media that seems to have escaped you and not specifically talking about Bewitched, but your mention of "pay the creators" raises the question of who exactly receives money from the sale of DVDs. Sol Saks is arguably the creator of Bewitched and he died back in 2011, so I have my doubts about whether copyright law is working as intended to incentivise him to make more shows.
Edit: Just had a look on wikipedia and everyone listed there in relation to Bewitched is now dead.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nazi_book_burnings
Before you say the DMCA isn’t the same, here are some modern incidents where copyright was used to censor things by repressive regimes:
https://www.ft.com/content/63cbf209-656f-4f99-9ee3-722755c22...
https://www.accessnow.org/dmca-takedown-demands-censor-activ...
And a roundup of how it is being misused in other ways:
I refuse buying a Play Station specifically because I despise Sony Corporation for that.
The Sony BMG rootkit fiasco demonstrated that they hold their customers in contempt and treat them as their enemies. I'm still pissed about their removal of the Linux capability from the PS3 (or at least you couldn't use both Linux and play games on it as was originally advertised and sold).
It makes no sense to count everything with "Sony" in it as the same company if you're talking about their morals.
I can’t see how anyone wouldn’t expect a takedown notice for posting them or similar shows on YouTube.
Even the very old videos got deleted so often that I gave up.
At least last time I wanted to watch Tom and Jerry with my youngest daughter it was gone.
(Or maybe that was still within copyright? I don't know.)
The very first Tom and Jerry was only 80 years ago, another 10-20 years before the ones released towards the end of the 1940s would be available
You can get a lot of them on amazon.
The idea of trademarks is to prevent customer confusion, and while there's some abuse and perverse incentives most trademark law makes sense through that lens. You are allowed to sell your used Ford F150 under the trademark Ford, because that's an accurate description. It doesn't stop being a Ford, pretty much no matter what you do to it. But if you build a car from scratch and claim it's a Ford F150 that's a trademark violation because you would be pretending that the vehicle was made by the Ford Motor Company, with their manufacturing standards, quality control etc.
Not being able to do the former doesn’t mean you shouldn’t do the latter, especially if the risk is “real”.
(My system is relatively cheap as it only consists of a ZFS mirror array and some offline drives; a major fire might take me out but the stuff that should survive that is offsite.)
Our neighbourhood just recently got fiber to the home, so I will be going from 30Mbps upload to 940Mbps upload in a couple weeks. Then I can get some proper offsite backups going.
Do I use it? My wife watches media on jellyfin, but I just have a compulsion to gather data and hoard it. I restrict myself to a 36U server rack at least, so it doesn't take up much physical space.
Do you have any opinions?
Thanks for more information.
I wish I had access to a tape library though, just it is hard to justify the upfront cost. My cluster has organically grown over the last ten years or so, making a huge near $8000 single purchase for a new tape drive, plus however much automatic tape rotation costs (I presume I need some sort of tape library for that? I have never used tape before) would be hard to justify.
You can spend that money on way more drives and increase the number of copies you have on and offline.
As for automation the libraries aren’t much more than the drive, but you can also just manually load tapes if you had to.
Why 20x overhead over raw storage cost?
May as well use
Would it be nice if they added a 'monetize, but don't penalize the uploader, since this is really not something we care about that deeply' option for content owners? Sure.
But the real solution is in copyright law reform, specifically in mandatory licensing. If, say, what a content owner can charge for a license to certain content is, like, 20% of their total revenue for that particular content over the past 5 years, that would solve an awful lot of problems. Plus, make cross-provider access to certain other content a lot more convenient for consumers.
But in this case, the copyright strikes are for full episodes of the TV show Bewitched, which the copyright holder does care about and is currently selling for $1.99 per episode [2].
And I don't know about the whole mandatory licensing thing. There are certainly places where I would not want things I've written or photos I've taken to appear, even if they paid me.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Content_ID_(system)
[2] https://www.amazon.com/gp/video/detail/amzn1.dv.gti.1ca9f72f...?
Turns out someone was re-selling it on media and the label had auto-filed all their holdings. So you'd get flagged on every usage.
The sergeant in charge of the correspondence for the band was annoyed but as YouTube is private there honestly wasn't anything they could do (other than write me a polite response to send on that I was correct). I did make them aware of it in the unlikely event someone else asks, though.
Annoyingly enough YouTube doesn't take down the automatic match even when it's a false claim from what I saw.
Why not just put all those videos on a webserver?
Note: Not defending Sony or any Big Inc, simply wonder how the law is written and how that drives corporate behavior.
https://www.eff.org/issues/intellectual-property/guide-to-yo...
IANAL, but IMO, you have several points in your favor to argue that yours is "fair use":
1. You're not (I presume) making money from it
2. Part of it is news, which is more likely to be fair use than creative works.
3. The content is old and the quality is poor compared to today's standards.
4. The current market value of the content is not very high. It's not like you are publishing the upcoming Dune sequel. Current market value and whether you are taking away money from the copyright owner are considerations in determining fair use.
If you are actually setup as a museum or online library, I would think that would bolster your case even further that this is fair use.
As I said, I am not a lawyer and this is only my opinion. However, I do think people are much too quick to cave on these automated DMCA takedowns. If you do dispute it, what's the likelihood this Indian company or Sony is going to sue you? Whether you are willing to take that risk is of course your decision, but their entire operation would fall apart if everyone disputed their claims. It only works because everyone caves immediately.
Some of the points may be true, but it is virtually impossible that these uses are fair.
Here are some reasons:
1. While the content may be old, and the production quality may not be considered high by today's viewers, these factors are not really relevant. The quality of the reproduction of the works, meanwhile, is good enough that they can be effectively viewed; while these may be less marketable than a copy made from a master, this is more than faithful enough to serve as a market replacement for the original (and thus infringes).
2. The current overall market value of the works is irrelevant. The question in an infringement suit is not whether or not there is a market for the work; it is whether or not whatever value the work could have is affected by the re-used version being used as a replacement. A popular work may have a greater market value than an unpopular one, but copyright law does not protect works based on popularity. Even if the actual market value of the original is near zero anyway, this does not make giving away free copies a fair use (since that destroys whatever market value the original could have).
3. The work has not been transformed in any way. The reproduction is faithful (to the extent this was technologically possible). The copies tend to be of the entire work. The purpose of the work (display for viewing) is the same as the original purpose; there is no transformation.
The channel here is reproducing the original works in their entirety. These copies serve as a good substitute for any copies the original copyright holder could be making and selling/licensing. This boils down to the question: do these copies fulfill any demand there might be for the originals? The answer is yes. This is not fair use.
The question of whether or not a copyright holder strictly enforces the copyrights — in many cases, they don't — isn't relevant; they remain valid.
Now, for a lot of people, this seems unfair. The original works are often not available on the market. A lot of people think that non-marketed works should be able to be copied by non-profits for the public's use. But that's not something the law allows.
YouTube is not something that you just dump something on. It's not a big truck. It's a series of tubes. And if you don't understand, those tubes can be copyright and if they are copyright, when you put your video in, it gets in line, and it's going to be taken down by anyone that holds onto enormous amounts of copyright material, enormous amounts of copyright of material.
He was fairly maligned for being against network neutrality, though.
If you’re around my age, you don’t need to use the Bing to picture in your head that graphic of horses being able to run through the tubes.
(Jon Stewart also kinda made me and everyone I knew think Arby’s was terrible for a long time.
With great memes comes… the responsibility to recognize that not everyone has Katz!)
;)
(A sibling comment points out that calling them "tubes" instead of "pipes" reinforces this garbled-regurgitation impression)
>And if you don't understand, those tubes can be filled and if they are filled, when you put your message in, it gets in line and it's going to be delayed by anyone that puts into that tube enormous amounts of material, enormous amounts of material.
He thinks the Internet is like a pneumatic tube, where too much usage means people are entirely cut off for a time. In truth it's like a water pipe. Too much usage results in reduced throughput to each user, but no one is even temporarily cut off.
Networks avoid queues. A well-designed network will handle email with no perceptible slowdown even under extreme congestion. The Senator's metaphor predicts that email will regularly take days to arrive because of congestion. The standard pipe analogy predicts this will almost never happen.
But really, the Internet is like a global packet-switched network of networks. We deserve politicians who can handle the truth.
> an Internet was sent by my staff at 10 o'clock in the morning on Friday. I got it yesterday. Why? Because it got tangled up with all these things going on the Internet commercially.
Tubes or trucks: movie downloads were not causing emails to be delayed by 4 days, even back in those days.
The US is a country of 330M people, the world is a community of 8B people. If we want to be able to live side by side, we need rules and policies. It's always going to messy.
I would love it if in the next few decades we improve "the game" and figure out better ways to incentivise the players towards common good.
"The game" is brutal. The players only care for themselves. "The game" is as unfair as it gets. Most don't live side by side, they survive inspite of others. Competition is brutal. Got sick with cancer? Sorry, lose all "points". Want to buy X? Sorry, me (cancerless) will out bargain you.
How can we change it though? Looking at history, changes come through either (usually bloody) revolution, or through politics themselves.
So unfortunately, someone needs to play the game in order to change it.
I am not moralizing here, by the way. I am not claiming that corporations should be less sociopathic. Maybe they should be but we’ve had much better success in aligning sociopathy than in making the amoral, moral - see capitalism vs communism - so I think it’s an open question.
Another group of entities which, while comprised of people, does not act in the way you’ve come to understand a human to act is politicians. The incentives to act in whatever way that is most effective totally dominates their behavior. A politician who does not do what the job asks (amass political power) will not be a politician for long.
I think that's where we seem to differ? "Whatever is most effective"
I'll grant democracy as practiced has many side effects and incentive traps.
However, it also does generally align politician's goals with their voters, under threat of being kicked out of office.
I’m only saying that effectively sociopathic agents do not deserve the courtesies, the benefit of the doubt that we afford regular people.
I don't believe there are that many politicians who literally don't believe anything they support and are only doing it because they think it will win them elections.
Greater than zero, but less than most.
Most spend a non-trivial amount of time on electioneering, and a non-trivial amount of consideration on the re-electability impacts of a given decision, but also do things for a variety of other reasons (e.g. personal convictions, campaign promises, lobbying, etc).
See e.g. "Al Gore and the Internet" by Robert Kahn and Vinton Cerf https://amsterdam.nettime.org/Lists-Archives/nettime-l-0009/...
Etymologically ... they're distinct (pipe derives from Latin *pipa, tube is of unknown origin), but the meanings are largely interchangeable.
<https://www.etymonline.com/word/pipe>
<https://www.etymonline.com/word/tube>
"Pipe" has an additional meaning of a musical instrument (which may be related to its origin).
"Tube" tends to be used for larger structures, such as the London Underground Railroad, a/k/a "The Tube". It's also a reference (via cathode ray tube to television, which the Late Senator might have in mind. Even larger structures may be referred to as bores or tunnels.
"Pipes", though, are more usually used as an alternative reference to network or Internet infrastructure. Which makes Stevens's description somewhat discordant. An out-of-tune piping, if you will.
hoses -flexible, often higher pressure, usually round x-section.
tubes -often like pipes but x-section can be of various geometries, round, square, oval, etc. often flexible.
pipes - often rigid, often metal, round x-section.
A few sources sugggest that tubes tend to be structural, where pipes tend to be functional. E.g., <https://www.appmfg.com/blog/what-is-the-difference-between-t...>
(I suspect that's general trade copy as I'm finding it on several suppliers' sites.)
A distinction that occurs to me is that both pipes and hoses may be high-pressure, though typically tubes are not.
Pipes are often classified by the material used in fabrication: wood, copper, clay, steel.
Hose is almost always flexible, and often used for temporary or mobile applications (air hose, fire hose, garden hose, dryer hose).
Another related term is duct, which comes from Latin ducere, "to lead", which is what ducts do: they lead somewhere. <https://www.etymonline.com/word/duct>
I'm not sure that pipes must be circular or rounded, as "square pipe" is in fact a thing (though a minority thing).
Another distinction between pipes and tubes is that pipes are specific to transport, that is, something flows through a pipe. A tube however describes a shape and there can be structural tubes, either hollow or filled, through which there is no flow. One example is sleeves used to form concrete support columns: these are tubes (often of paperboard), into which structural steel and cement mix are poured, resulting in solid, static columns. That's discussed here:
<https://www.eng-tips.com/viewthread.cfm?qid=455180>
We also talk of "speaking tubes", which were used for communications, especially on ships or in factories. There are containers which are tubes, which hold and emit their contents, but contents don't flow through them, transiting end-to-end: toothpaste tube, tube of caulk, grease tube.
Some animals have tubular bones, most notably birds.
Putting this together, I'd argue that a tube is a general shape which may apply to a usually rigid pipe or a flexible hose, which are often used to duct fluids (gasses or liquids) from some source to a destination.
In networking a pipe is a metaphor for a circuit. We have fat pipes into HQ. Saying you have fat tubes would seem odd.
That is, a tube has a through void, which doesn't describe wires or fibre (though one might argue that those have a metaphorical void relative to electric current or light pulses). A pipe however conveys a flow from one point to another.
In that light, "fat pipes" makes more sense than "fat tubes".
Though retro-rationalisation of linguistic evolution is a highly fraught endeavour.
YTMND - Tubular Nets
https://tubularnets.ytmnd.com/
NSFW btw.
The 7 scariest words in the English language.
Who the heck do you think makes these messes?
If you dispute the claim its judged by checks notes the person who claimed copyright.
Even if the original work is 120 - yes, 120 - years old!
See first comment on
They should. But that doesn't prevent social consequences, including badmouthing them on their rationale.
Your response would be very relevant if the OP was proposing a law that would force them to carry such content, but that doesn't seem to be the case here.