Dmca

YouTube, Comedy Central Tussle More About Ad Inventory Than Copyright

Posted by Jeff

While the battle currently centers on Comedy Central clips, the war is reportedly more about pre-roll ads than copyright concerns. ... Unlike Comedy Central's broadband offering Motherload (or similar offerings from Viacom-owned MTV and VH1), clips on YouTube don't include pre-roll ads, which is vexing to Viacom. It sees a large potential sales opportunity going to waste, and is using the DMCA requests as leverage in an attempt to get YouTube to allow both pre-roll ads on their content.

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Truthiness is scarce at Viacom and YouTube this week

Posted by Jeff

Surprisingly, most of the mainstream reporters who interviewed me about breaking the story Friday, October 27th that Comedy Central had issued copyright takedown notices to YouTube wanted me to verify that any videos were actually taken down at all. More recently, some media blogs are asking whether I started an unsubstantiated rumor based only on the two takedown notices that I received directly.

Tonight, using the Google Search API, I wrote a short PHP script to tabulate content from YouTube that is present or missing based on top search hits from Google’s search engine. I’ve posted my results at Idealog .

While not entirely scientific or entirely representative, my top line results show that 349 of 764 or 46 percent of the top Daily Show clips in Google search results are missing and broken, 190 of 537 or 35 percent of the Colbert Report results and 138 of 594 or 23 percent of South Park results. So, while you can still find 2,723 videos at YouTube.com of the Daily Show, 881 videos of the Colbert Report and 6,660 of South Park, the percentage of broken links from Google’s top results show that there either has been an ongoing take down or a large recent takedown effort at YouTube.

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DMCA revision proposal will criminalize "attempting" infringment

Posted by Billbar from BoingBoing

A new proposed set of amendments to the US's loathsome DMCA would send you to prison for attempting to infringe copyright. It would make it even more illegal to own tools that could be used to remove copy-restrictions.

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Unintended Consequences: Seven Years under the DMCA

Posted by Billbar from Electronic Frontier Foundation

A collection of a number of reported cases where the anti-circumvention provisions of the DMCA have been invoked not against pirates, but against consumers, scientists, and legitimate competitors.

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Why they say spyware is good for you

Posted by Billbar from News.com

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