As Curiosity touches down on Mars, video is taken down from YouTube | Hacker News Reader

As Curiosity touches down on Mars, video is taken down from YouTube

arstechnica.com

82 pointsevo_923 comments

It's time for penalties for false DMCA takedown notices.

Or maybe, three strikes, then you lose your right to file free/automated takedowns.

They already exist, problem is the penalties don't kick in unless you counterfile to restore your content, and then take the original requestor to court for filing notices in bad faith, something that requires one hell of a case to prove.

I'd be perfectly fine with lobbying for penalties for accidental takedowns, though. You have the power to take down anything anywhere in the USA, fine. You should be forced to take responsibility for that. As it stands, they can shrug and say "oops" and leave a trail of damage in their wake.

>They already exist, problem is the penalties don't kick in unless you counterfile to restore your content, and then take the original requestor to court for filing notices in bad faith, something that requires one hell of a case to prove.

I have long wondered... if I remember correctly, when you file a DMCA counter notice, you have to say under penalty of perjury that you believe that the original notice was filed "in error". Would that potentially interfere with a later claim that the notice was filed in bad faith?

Why would "in error" and "in bad faith" be mutually exclusive?

In error means they screwed up innocently. In bad faith means they screwed up willfully.

If it was a content id takedown (which it sounds like it was, and Ars thinks so too), the DMCA is not involved at all; Google's content id system allows takedowns that do not use the DMCA system and thus do not expose the filer to a perjury charge. Google might penalize the company some other way, but it doesn't seem like it from the outside.

Well, I'm not sure I condone this behavior, but the Fox News thing to do here is for NASA to blackball Scripps, and to refuse to grant them interviews or access to their events.

Isn't Content ID automatic? Could be Scrips just says yes automatically to every hit generated by Content ID.

That doesn't absolve Scripps of their responsibility to make sure that the content going into their system isn't owned by someone else.

If one were the sort to blackball others, the fact that an algorithm did it for them, on the basis of data that they fed in is essentially no excuse for me.

> that the content going into their system

I thought it was a mistaken identification? I.e. it was youtube's fault, not Scripps.

“We apologize for the temporary inconvenience experienced when trying to upload and view a NASA clip early Monday morning," a Scripps spokesman told Motherboard. "We made a mistake. We reacted as quickly as possible to make the video viewable again, and we’ve adjusted our workflow processes to remedy the situation in future.”

I repeat myself: "Could be Scrips just says yes automatically to every hit generated by Content ID."

So they have some responsibility for saying yes (i.e. their workflow was select all, yes), but it was youtube that misidentified the video, not that Scrips uploaded a video from NASA into content ID as you wrote.

If NASA is putting info up freely, couldn't Scripps just incorporate that into its media regardless?

If they are not guilty of perjury, then surely they are guilty of some kind of commercial fraud. Could action be taken from that angle?

Google are free to take down any video they like for any reason, including "this other company asked us to". It's entirely up to the contract between them and Google (which I haven't read) whether they're subject to any penalties for asking Google to take down something they didn't actually own.

Yup. And for takedowns, legitimate or not, that takedown other non-infringing content.

How about a three strike or six strike rule for false take down notices? Pass that threshold, and no more DMCA for you.

/snark, but also seriously

Maybe not NO DMCA, but degraded DMCA.

Your DMCA request is awaiting moderation. Have a nice day.

YouTube doesn't require DMCA takedowns - they just trust the copyright holder. So "no more DMCA" wouldn't even stop this. The problem is Google's fire-and-forget method of automated interaction with humans.

This is how they took down Megaupload's Ad.

Does anyone know how these DCMA/ ContentID calims work in practice?

As I understand it currently, the news segment was probably send to someone who fingerprints it and crawls youtube for infringement. They then send Google a take-down notice and some bot at Google takes down the video and sends a mail to NASA, where for the first time a human notices that some news segment did copy a video from NASA.

I think we need legislation or, at least, some sort of groundwork regulation that protects user-generated content from company-issued end-user agreements tied to private takedown workflows, such as Google's content-id system. Such agreements tend to give publishers and copyright owners far too much power. I'm even thinking of left-field cases here, such as the right to control and redistribute content in the backdrop of Craiglist vs. PadMapper -- regardless of who's right or not, these two websites are fighting over content that _wasn't actually produced by either one of them_. It's come to the point where websites and their business partners have become de facto copyright owners of anything ever produced by mankind. What I'm saying is quite hyperbolic, I know, but just imagine a glitch in Time-Warner's top-notch automated content takedown workflow that takes down from You Tube, Vimeo and DropBox, almost instantly, a homevideo of my 8-year old son's rendition of Bach's Suite for Cello, due to a striking similarity to some piece of content supposedly owned by a prominent customer of theirs. Sounds familiar?

For instance, under my hypothetical legislation, Google would only be allowed to take down NASA's video if NASA accepted such action via an email notification that warned of a copyright claim by a third party. Such legislation would limit Google's liability (even further), protecting it from legal action by Scripps Local News, but most importantly, limit its power over the user's content published in its website, thus effectively (and I hope positively) diminishing Google's role as a copyright claim desk. The burden now would be on Scripps Local News to "threaten" (warn) the end-user of impending legal actions. This system works better the less anonymous and more accountable you, or your profile, are. OTOH, it reduces Google's persuasiveness when it comes to partnering with large media producers, which, all in all, is the heart of this content removal fever. Google's stance is to beg the user to bear with these takedown "glitches" because that's how we'll get to watch the full Beatles concertography for "free".

This fantasy takedown and redistribution noob legislation of mine, which has been addressed before [1], has many limitations (ie legal inconsistencies across borders), but I feel something needs to be done to better protect UGC since its existence, despite its metamorphic nature, has remained a constant for as long as we've had the internets.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User-generated_content#Legal_pr...

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