Copyright – SomeGadgetGuy

November 11, 2015

How Facebook Profits Off of Stolen Content

As a Youtube content producer, I depend on ads and affiliate links to continue producing content. A single camera review will often take three or four days to produce for example. I stick with Youtube because they share revenue from ad sales and have a decent system in place to stop people who steal me videos and re-distribute them.

Facebook is claiming incredible video view growth, but these numbers are rigged pretty bad. They count a view after three seconds, even when the video is muted, and viewer engagement past 20 seconds is pitiful. They do not offer a revenue share, and have very poor tools for protecting copyright.

Basically uploading a video to Facebook only improves Facebook and a creator’s standing on Facebook for more likes. I can’t pay rent or buy food with “internet points”.

A new trend in stealing popular Youtube videos is rearing its head, emboldened by the fact that Facebook is fantastically passive in replying to copyright issues.

Following the digital extortion Facebook engages in with page posts, blocking your content from a majority of the people who like your page until you pay Facebook, these types of shenanigans are vile.

Youtube producer In A NutShell has published a fantastic infographic animated video detailing Facebook’s failure to defend content producers. If you care about smaller producers continuing to distribute high quality content, this video makes for an interesting educational watch.

August 14, 2014

Why Wikipedia is WRONG to Share the “Monkey Selfie” as Public Domain

David J Slater, a British photographer set up a camera in Indonesia to capture monkeys at play. One monkey managed to snap an extraordinary “selfie”.

Wikipedia claims that because the monkey hit the shutter button, the image belongs in the Public Domain. I disagree…

March 31, 2014March 31, 2014

UK Government Updates Copyright Regulations – Copying for Personal Use Now Legal

Good news everybody! The UK is taking steps towards refining their copyright law, publishing new exceptions to their current set of regulations.

At play is new language which makes personal use copying way less illegal than it was before, and brings intellectual property law overseas into the 21st century. From the GOV.UK press release:

The changes make small but important reforms to UK copyright law and aim to end the current situation where minor and reasonable acts of copying which benefit consumers, society and the economy are unlawful. They also remove a range of unnecessary rules and regulations from the statute book in line with the government’s aim to reduce regulation.

The government has consulted extensively on these changes and on the draft legislation, and listened carefully to the views of a wide range of stakeholders. As a result of this process, the legislation published today strikes an important balance between enabling reasonable use of copyright material in the modern age with minimal impact on copyright owners.

Making personal use expressly clear could help clear up some of the legal grey area surround digital media duplication. Obviously this changes almost nothing in regards to distribution of copied files and file sharing.

Here in the USA, there’s often confusion as to whether personal copies are legal. Thanks to the DMCA, often the resulting copy is legal, but any methods used to circumvent copy protection are illegal. It would be nice if we could get similar clarification here as well, so hopefully this sets some kind of precedent for future negotiations with the RIAA and MPAA.

Changes to IP law should go into effect on June 1st. More info on the GOV.UK press release site.

September 16, 2013

Courts agree with MPAA, Fair Use consideration unnecessary for DMCA take down.

A digital lifetime ago, I used to co-host and co-produce a movie review show called Movies You May Have Missed. Each week we’d craft a video love letter to a film we wished had gotten more attention. We think we did our jobs well, with respect, and we were proud to stay spoiler free, assuming the film in question was “new to you”. We studied Fair Use to make sure we were operating within its bounds, and contacted lawyers who vetted our content. We loved these films, and wanted to share them with other like-minded cinema fans.

The problem? We used clips of the films in our discussion to illustrate things we liked about those films.

This meant Youtube was largely a non-starter. Every episode posted to that social network would get shot down in a hail of auto-copyright ID checks. We spent a significant amount of time fighting each one, with little support. Google’s tools for Youtubers are pretty hands off in regards to these kinds of claims. You’re guilty before you can prove yourself innocent. If you’re not already a big player and famous enough to make a lot of noise, you have little recourse to correcting those copyright strikes. We ultimately had to host episodes elsewhere just so people could see them. Even though we haven’t produced an episode in well over year, MYMHM still pulls in some small traffic from fans, last tally was over 350,000 channel views for August. On old content. None of it monetized, as most online rules for such behavior are draconian. Not only were we not allowed to profit from our hard work, even just to pay off our website hosting, we were barely free to even show people our show. The largest audiences were consistently denied us.

I continue to entertain bringing the show back some day, but our legal system has taken steps towards making that return even more unlikely.

TechDirt is reporting on a strange court case involving two incredibly obnoxious bloggers flinging abusive and stifling DMCA take down requests at each other. In previous cases regarding these types of filings, the MPAA has argued that Congress did not intend for filers to have to consider Fair Use when filing infringement take down requests. This would seem to be the whole point of Fair Use if you examine the laws surrounding our rights in interacting with copyrighted materials, unfortunately the courts reviewing this online squabble have sided with the MPAA’s arguments. This case between two people having an internet cat fight has now opened the doors for even more abuse of a vaguely defined set of protections for major media companies.

And this is why we can’t have nice things.

Techdirt also has a transcript of the court’s decision in PDF.