CBS sends a YouTube takedown to itself


Here's yet another example of the TV industry's love-hate relationship with YouTube: a CBS website hosting a YouTube clip that has been removed due to a copyright claim from CBS.
* Third party posts clip of a reporter speaking strangely at the Grammy's on youtube.
* Blog hosted on CBS' website embeds the clip posted by the third party in a post going over what happened.
* CBS files a DMCA takedown request on the third party's video.
* Video goes missing from their own stories as a result.
CBS files a copyright claim against themselves o_O

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  1. This isn’t a copyright thing – CBS knee-jerked trying to take down the reporter video when they were worried it was a stroke. They’ve since eased up.

    1. Well if it’s NOT about copyright then they should sue themselves for abusing DMCA takedown notices. Now THAT would be funny.

      1. Well if it’s NOT about copyright then they should sue themselves for abusing DMCA takedown notices.

        Except, of course, that we don’t actually know that this particular was the result of a DMCA notice. It just says “a copyright claim”. Not every “copyright claim” involves a DMCA takedown notice.

        “I’m the copyright owner, and that was posted by one of my employees. Please remove it” is a copyight claim, after all. The YouTube boilerplate notice doesn’t say anything about DMCA take-down notices.

        ‘m bgnnng t thnk tht jmpng t cnclsns s th nly xrcs sm f y flks vr gt. :-)

  2. All I know is right now there are two teams of lawyers patting themselves on the back and explaining to their clients how their mad legal skillz successfully avoided a long and expensive lawsuit and why they should therefore be paid more.

    1. This is so true. I work with lawyers and don’t think for a second they think this was a snafu. The more confusion the better, it generates billable hours.

  3. It’s strange how everyone has forgotten about fair use. The clips of this event are short and illustrate an obvious news-worthy event: clearly within the domain of fair use.

    1. No one has ‘forgotten’ about fair use.

      You might want to read up on YouTube’s procedures concerning DMCA take-down notices and the procedures for users who believe their material was not an infringement (including claims of fair use) to file a counter-notice. That’s how claims of fair use are dealt with at YouTube.

      Fair use wasn’t forgotten. It’s just not as simple as some people seem to assume.

      Hosting services are under no obligation to defend your claim of fair use – and, generally speaking, you have to actually give official notice of such a claim to the hosting service if you want them to do anything other than automatically comply with a take-down notice.

      [Obligatory disclaimer: I am not a lawyer and this is not legal advice. If you feel you have a valid fair use claim, I recommend obtaining legal advice from a qualified professional. But, hey, I’m not your mother. Do whatever makes you happy.]

      1. Great. So now the two teams of lawyers described by mccrum and simonbarsinister get to bill more hours by filing a counter-notice from CBS to CBS ;]

        (Oh, and small but important nitpick: The CBS site is not hosting the video, only embedding a video hosted by YouTube. If the CBS site were hosting the video, I bet this would not have happened, because I can’t imagine CBS sending a DMCA takedown letter to CBS! To YouTube/Google, I guess, but not to the same company… right?)

        1. But (probably) no one at CBS is interested in counter-noticing the takedown, because CBS (probably) isn’t trying to be the exclusive posters of that clip – they want the clip removed from YouTube entirely, no matter who posted it. Including their own people.

          I expect, in fact, that the blanket removal was entirely intentional; and they did it that way rather than mess around trying to figure out how many and which of their authorized posters posted it.

          They just told YouTube, “take ’em ALL down, no matter who posted them.”

          And, as the copyright holder, they’re perfectly entitled to do that.

          It’s not a snafu; there’s no confusion; no one’s trying to ‘generate more billable hours.’ (On the contrary, they’re trying to save the time and bother of having to get all the CBS-authorized uploaders to remove each instance one by one.)

          All the smirking and snarking going on here is completely misplaced. They did exactly what they intended to do – and in the quickest and most efficient manner possible.

          They didn’t ‘send themselves a takedown notice.’ They sent *YouTube* a takedown notice. They wanted YouTube to take down ALL the copies of that clip, not just the unauthorized ones.

          And they accomplished that, with minimum fuss and effort.

  4. I think what this really means is that CBS doesn’t have their own internal video asset management system together and has to rely on YouTube just like the rest of us plebes.

  5. Heh, i recall Sony suing Sony once by proxy. Basically the RIAA sued its equivalent electronics group over looking the other way on the ability of their products to make copies. And while Sony media was member of RIAA, Sony electronics was member of the other.

    Blue on blue, gotta love it.

  6. First: IANAL
    A lot of people don’t understand that Fair Use is NOT an affirmative right, it is a defense against charges of copyright infringement. What this means is that if you are accused of infringement, you then have to prove that your usage met Fair Use standards. It’s not a blanket you can waive around easily, and is not always a clear cut standard.
    Second, if I recollect correctly, a DMCA notice requires the carrier to take down the materials immediately and notify the user, who then can file a counter claim and ask for it to be restored.

    1. Tiny quibble: A DMCA takedown notice doesn’t require the hosting company to do anything at all.

      But if they comply promptly, they’re shielded from liability.

      They could just say, “Oh, that’s fair use, you ninny – go stuff yourself.”

      But then if the rights holder disagrees and sues for infringement – and the court agrees with the rights holder – they’ll be liable for the infringement.

      And very few hosting companies are interested in exposing themselves to potential liability in order to test out some copyfighter’s claim of fair use.

      You want to ‘fight the power’, that’s up to you. It’s not YouTube’s job to do it on your behalf.

  7. I think this one was taken down because it could be embarrassing or worrying for the reporter. I caught the video on gawker, and it’s a bit scary – it looks like it was a minor stroke or something of that nature.

    The DMCA thing is, I think, just a way to get them taken down right away.

  8. As a few of the commenters have noted, this situation wasn’t really about copyright/fair use issues. The video was of a local TV reporter here in L.A. slurring her speech on air in what experts say appears to be either a stroke or transient ischemic attack. If you’ve seen the video, it’s pretty disturbing and scary. The NYT has a story up right now, and it does include the video, if you’re curious. But it’s also very embarrassing for the reporter, which appears to be why CBS has since used DMCA to save her reputation. Right or wrong, CBS’ motives appear to be pretty respectable in this case

  9. Insanity of different but related proportions: as various fellow euro peons certainly know, Youtube videos are in all likelihood blocked for us as soon as there is just a whiff of music in them, due to copyright claims by BMG or UMG or WMG or Sony or whoever it happens to be.

    Now, just for shits’n giggles, go over to, say, the official Youtube account of Phil Collins. That is, where the official Phil Collins himself officially publishes official music videos of his, and see what you, uh, see.

    I, for one, see something kinda like this. Now what exactly am I supposed to conclude from this?

    1. A perfect example of the legal inertia a generation or two of recorded media have generated. As long as there are non-national TLDs floating around, the net is global (no matter ho much USA law wants to treat anything under non-national TLDs as if it was under the .US domain).

  10. Well, they wouldn’t be the first to issue a takedown notice against themselves.

    A few months a go I was having enormous problems with Google Apps. At the time Google had just transitioned their Google Apps infrastructure to Google Accounts. This meant that you didn’t need to create a separate Google Account to use services outside of the core Google Apps applications.

    I was having some problems, so I decided to delete my old Google Account. I had assumed (yes, assume means it makes an ass of you and me..) that if you nuked a Google Account it’ll delete everything associated with it – including uploaded videos to YouTube, etc. WRONG! I found out that my old videos were still on YouTube and I couldn’t access them. So I went to the YouTube forums:

    http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/youtube/thread?tid=7e4558cedbcf30d1&hl=en

    In short: in order to delete videos from orphaned accounts you’ve got to send in a copyright claim against yourself. And it worked! So I’m wondering if CBS has moved Google Accounts or transitioned to Google Apps or something internal to the way Google deals with account data..

    Either way the outcome is I’m now suing myself for violating my own copyright and representing myself as both prosecutor and defendant. I stand to win all round! ;)

    1. “Either way the outcome is I’m now suing myself for violating my own copyright and representing myself as both prosecutor and defendant. I stand to win all round! ;)”

      There’s a “The Producers”-esque movie in there somewhere.

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