A striking example comes from film critic Doug Walker, from Channel Awesome, who received a copyright strike from Studio Ghibli based on an obviously fair use review of the movie My Neighbor Totoro. And in the meantime, the flaws in the algorithmic system have gotten worse. YouTube will defend people from minor league legal trolls, but it is silent on the abuse of claims by large companies. That was in September of last year, and seemed to be paying dividends, as YouTube rolled out a preliminary system to protect fair use for certain videos.īut it hasn't gone anywhere. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit upheld fair use, confirming that a copyright holder must consider fair use before issuing a takedown notice. And because there is no penalty for a fraudulent claim, people often attempt to swipe the revenue from obvious fair use, or even from content they don't even own.Ībuse of takedown claims recently went to federal court in Lenz vs.
Companies that get bad press sometimes use the system to try to censor negative reviews or coverage. However, these revenue claims are often abused by corporations and individuals, who routinely do not prove or even check whether content is fair use before issuing the claim. It's a quasi-legal kludge that allows copyright holders to get paid for the use of their content without having to fill out hundreds of millions of licensing agreements, or file lawsuit after lawsuit attempting to protect their content. It's the revenue claim aspect of the system that's most important. Content ID also allows holders to claim the ad revenue from infringing videos (or put ads on a video that didn't have them before). They can mute the video's audio, or block it in countries where they hold the copyright in question. However, the Content ID system gives holders other automated tools. law holding that people can legally copy portions of works verbatim under certain circumstances, such as critique, parody, commentary, reporting, or education. The major problem is "fair use." This is the part of U.S. This is the place where copyright realpolitik is being hashed out, and it bears barely any resemblance to the law. That brings me back to YouTube, far and away the largest video hosting site on the internet, where thousands of entrepreneurs have made careers out of video production. Original artists can also claim shelter under the basic framework, but that's little more than a coincidence.
The " Mickey Mouse Curve," showing how Congress keeps extending the copyright term just as Mickey Mouse was about to enter the public domain, demonstrates the basic truth of copyright in 2016: It's about making money for huge corporations. As such, there is a trade-off between enriching the common cultural heritage - the public domain - and allowing authors to profit from their work. With copyright there is no underlying physical object to protect - the policy is about restricting the right of others to make copies, not the right of access to scarce resources. People often refer to copyright as something akin to land or physical possessions ("intellectual property"), but it just is a government-created monopoly enforced through legal coercion. First, it's important to understand that copyright is regulation.