YouTube Video Taken Down Because Of Background Street Performer Impersonating ...

[Mike]

I imagine in some room somewhere, a whole bunch of people in well-tailored suits came up with the idea of DMCA takedowns and thought it'd be just peaches. The practical application of that policy, however, has been something of a performance art piece on how intellectual property is a canard better left on the cutting room floor. YouTube in particular exemplifies this, what with their attempts to comply with rightsholders juxtaposed to a service model that just begs for case studies in inadvertent violations and strong arm attempts by confused non-rightsholders.

Peter writes in with the latest such example, concerning an uploader who put up his trek across the Brooklyn Bridge. The video was taken down for the silliest of reasons.

ANYWAY, I went through all of the trouble of uploading and editing both of these boring-ass videos to a popular Internet video hosting website, only to have the aforementioned website totally mute the Brooklyn Bridge video because there's a Michael Jackson impersonator at the foot of the bridge and he's performing to the song "Beat It," which you can hear in the background.

So, someone crossing a bridge has a video of the experience that includes the decades-old song of a deceased performer being reenacted by a street performer... and down the video goes. I imagine the originators of copyright are rolling over in their graves at this point, never imagining that automated systems would trip the flag on this kind of takedown. Even imagining for a moment that this wouldn't or shouldn't be considered fair use, can someone explain to me what the point of all this is?

I'm pretty sure incidental capture of a portion of a song being played by a street performer falls under "fair use," and I've disputed it because I have nothing better to do with my life, but in the meantime I'm inspired by the knowledge that our publicly-traded companies go to such great lengths to protect the copyrights of great Americans like Michael Jackson.

The reality of course is that the rights to the song are held by a third party label and this was just the automated system accidentally capturing a video that the label probably wouldn't even bother taking down itself and blah, blah, blah. All I know is this is really stupid and a hindrance to the simple sharing culture that humanity has always enjoyed. Thanks copyright.

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Originally Published: Wed, 09 Apr 2014 12:37:54 GMT
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