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02/21/07
Got home from work and had a few emails from YouTube, and one from BayTSP. I’m guessing that BayTSP is the company that Viacom pays to track down copyright infringement. A search turned up a few references to them and that sort of thing.
Anyway, all the emails I received were positive. For instance: “In response to your DMCA counter-notification, Viacom International has
retracted its copyright claim…” Very professional language in all the email.
I think it would have been a nice touch to be more apologetic. Heck, I’ve screwed up before and I always bend over backward to make friends. But whatever.
Here’s what BayTSP had to say: “With more than 100,000 unauthorized clips that needed to be removed from the site, unfortunately, there were isolated errors. We regret the inconvenience this may have caused and we will continue our ongoing efforts to convince YouTube to deliver on its promise of a more practical and effective method of protecting copyrighted content.”
OK. I’m fine with that.
But most importantly, my account is back. Action is what I really wanted after all. We’ll start posting new vlogs to it tomorrow.
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So it has now been more than a week since my “The Daily Vlog” account at YouTube was closed without explanation. It just says “This user account is suspended.” Like I’ve been sent to the principal’s office or something.
I’ve since been in contact with YouTube, and even though they agreed it was a mistake, the account is still closed. I found out only today what the third video was that they received a DCMA take-down notice for. Sure enough it was from Viacom, and sure enough it is as ridiculous as the others.
All three videos taken down were clearly non-infringing, as are all of the videos at “The Daily Vlog”. They are just us sitting at our sofa talking. No music, no clips, no chance to even enter a gray area.
According to a response I got for one of my counter-claims, they have to send the counter-claim to the original party. Now why would Comedy Central, Universal Music or Viacom devote any attention to a counter-claim? I wouldn’t be surprised if I never hear back on this. So the account is liekly permanently closed.
I’ve placed the three videos up at Blip.TV so anyone can see how bad the drag-nets are.
The Daily Vlog, 8/1/06 (Claim made by Comedy Central)
The Daily Vlog, 8/17/06 (Claim made by Viacom)
The Daily Vlog, 11/13/06 (Claim made by Universal Music Publishing Group)
The worst part, of course, if that I am guilty until I they determine I am innocent. And they have no motivation to do that.
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02/12/07
Today, without and explanation or warning, one of my YouTube accounts was closed. “Your account has now been permanently disabled.” is what we get when we try to log in. It was our Daily Vlog account, which is a 5-minute-per-day vlog from the office. It features us talking for 5 minutes. Couldn’t possibly be anything there they want to shut down, we don’t even deal with sensitive issues of any sort. And there certainly can’t be any intellectual property issues, unless someone patented “having a conversation on a sofa.”
You can see for yourself what the daily vlog is about by checking it out at http://thedailyvlog.com. You can see there is no reason why YouTube would want it removed.
I sent an email through their contact form, but I doubt they will respond. I’m glad I’m not relying on them for our main distribution. We’re doing that now through blip.tv, which I highly recommend.
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02/02/07
Tabuleiro, the makes of Director Xtras like ShapeShifter and the Nebulae multiuser server for Director have acquired and plan to update some well-known and very handy Xtras: ShockFiler, vList, TreeView and TextCruncher. I hear great things about vList and TextCruncher, though I haven’t needed to use them. I’ve never heard of ShockFiler before — the Xtra apparently lets you FTP changed text and image members to a server. Interesting. I’ve experimented with using Flash’s ability to access Web cams and iSights to capture your image and use it in a game. Check out my Web Cam Jigsaw Puzzle. I’d love to be able to send that back to the server in a better way than byte-by-byte. I’m not sure if I’d be able to capture the image in a Flash movie as a bitmap in Shockwave though. I’ll have to experiment.
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02/01/07
So today marks the second time in a few months that I got an email from YouTube accusing me of DMCA copyright infringement. Both were for our show, The Daily Vlog. This is a daily 5-minute vlog of uncut conversation from our office. We talk about our day, try to be funny, whatever. We do it 5 times a week, and have about 100, 150 episodes. Most are on YouTube, which I guess is a big enough number that we have two mistakenly tripped some sort of automatic copyright-finding bot that scours YouTube.
The first time it was the episode from August 1, entitled “Favorite Cancelled TV Shows” and the accuser was Comedy Central. I think we actually might mention a show from Comedy Central in our conversation, but I don’t see how mentioning a show is copyright infringement. Today is was an episode from November 11, entitled “Manic Monday” and it was Universal Music Group that got upset. I guess their bot tripped over the name of the episode, and they didn’t even bother to check it before accusing us of a crime. It is just us talking about our day, no mention of the song “Manic Monday” and certainly no playing of the song.
YouTube, of course, acts by taking the video down immediately. They don’t check either. They give confusing instructions about how to respond (mail or email?, what constitutes an “electronic signature”?). In the case of the August 1 episode, I never heard back from my email.
We’ve got so many episodes up there, and these are so old, that I don’t really feel like making a federal case out of this (though they already have, I guess). But it still bothers me to be accused of such a crime. And to be guilty until I prove myself innocent.
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