PRGuitarMan, creator of the awesome, meme-y, immensely popular NyanCat video, did not file a YouTube copyright claim resulting in the video's takedown; but someone impersonating him did. And though YouTube acts very quickly when they hear from putative rightsholders with takedown claims, they're seemingly impossible to budge when you're a rightsholder who wants your work put back. In the meantime, a million jerky-ass trolls are sending hatemail to poor PRGuitarMan.
""The email address that you have provided does not match the email address of the account in question. In order for us to review your issue, you must be the owner of the account. To resubmit your request, please return to the YouTube Help Center ""I did NOT file a Youtube Copyright Complaint (via Neatorama)So I've contacted Saraj00n about this. I also tried to file a counter DMCA (lol the irony), but it says:
"" A counter-notification is a legal demand that YouTube restore your video. There may be severe adverse legal consequences if this process is misused: if the original claimant does not want the video on YouTube, the claimant will be required to sue you.
If you are not prepared to face the claimant in court, you should not proceed. To dispute a copyright claim, you must be certain that you have all the necessary rights to post the video to YouTube including both audio and video. If you do not have the rights, you MUST NOT submit a counter-notification. Under Section 512(f) of the Copyright Act, any person who knowingly materially misrepresents that material or activity was removed or disabled by mistake or misidentification may be liable for damages.A counter-notification is not a valid forum for apologies or to seek restoration of an account terminated due to valid copyright claims.""
So NOW I've contacted Daniwell, who is the owner of the song since Youtube states I need 100% rights to have this up. Funny how someone can easily make a complaint but to actually prove it the owner has to jump through all of these hoops. FUN TIMES! But seriously, there is a lot of work involved here and it's pretty stressful.
Why not just let the meme die this funny beautiful death?
I think it’s kind of funny and ironic that something should be nothing, go viral, then die just as fast in such a ridiculous way.
It’s a beautiful comment on the ephemerality of the web. Besides, it’s not like this will ever actually disappear off the webwebs.
[quote]Funny how someone can easily make a complaint but to actually prove it the owner has to jump through all of these hoops. [/quote]
Not saying this is right, but a content host has a lot more to lose from keeping a copyrighted work up than they do honoring a take-down request.
Man, I swore those quote tags worked before. Can anyone tell me what the mark-up for blockquotes is?
it’s blockquote . Super easy mistake. Also, I totally agree with your point, if that was unclear.,
funny word choice there, “honored”.
blockquote is the official HTML; a lot of message boards just use quote, though I have no idea why.
The operative term being ‘html’.
Yeah, it sucks, but he didn’t have the musician’s permission? At no point during the viral-ization did he ever contact the guy? As much as I love Nyan Cat, if this is about the music, he might have deserved it.
On the other hand, there isn’t any other good reason why it should have been taken down.
a content host has a lot more to lose from keeping a copyrighted work up than they do honoring a take-down request.
I disagree. Often times DMCA takedown notices are issued against fair use works and free speech. A person has more to lose from having their speech taken down than a copyright owner has in having their copyrights violated. It’s the perversion of a law that is the DMCA that caused this lopsided set of priorities.
Exactly. YouTube sucks unless you’re a corporate shill, a 12-year-old girl, or someone who just slams up music videos one after the other with no regard for copyright.
Case in point: I am a filmmaker. I create original works, as well as remixes of current cultural references. As for the remixes, I don’t give a damn if they get flagged, or pulled, or region-blocked. They are for entertainment only.
But I have had several of my original works flagged (and one pulled) because they contain music that YouTube’s ContentID system identifies as infringing. “Well”, you may say, “You should use original music, or license the music you used in your pieces!” Guess what? I HAVE permission to use the music I do. Contrary to popular belief, it’s not really all that hard to get permission, especially when you’re using music from obscure artists who are often quite happy to give you ‘streaming only’ (as opposed to ‘distribution’) rights. Provided they get the link love, and your credits meet their approval, not problem. Unfortunately, their labels upload to ContentID, and the video gets flagged- because YouTube staff never look at the videos in question. They don’t give a flying fuck; all they want is to cover their asses. So you send in a counter-notification, which does absolutely NO good (you may get a boilerplate response several months later). In the meantime, your video, which meets ALL legal requirements regarding copyright, is gone or flagged.
YouTube sucks. The sad thing is, they do this whole ContentID thing just because it saves them time (therefore, money). The DMCA would allow them to be compliant by having each complaint looked at by a live Human rather than a ‘bot, but it would cost a lot more money.
My wish is for YouTube to burn in hell.
@freetard0: Have you looked into Vimeo? I see a lot of indie musicians and filmmakers there. Maybe they’re better in this regard? Don’t know, just wondering out loud.
So, you’re angry with Youtube, for having succumbed to the demands of some insane copyright holders with lots of money during a long and onerous suit against it? instead of being angry against the holders that pushed Youtube into this?
If it’s like this for Youtube, a now Giant and Google owner system, imagine what this will do to the creation of similar systems by entrepreneurs and indies…..
Like Lessig says, fair use is the right to be sued. And every day more, it goes beyond “fair use”. Soon “Creating content”, “Inventing Technology”, “Creating new services” will all be synonymous with “The right to be sued”. And only large corporations will be able to perform those acts of creation, if they care at all.
Right, that’s why I was talking about content hosts, e.g. YouTube, not the copyright holders.
Poor NyanCat creator! NyanCat has been burned in that great toaster in the sky.
Don’t feel bad. My Flickr and email accounts were deleted after too many bogus complaints on another Yahoo service. All my emails from past girlfriends and 2000+ (including childhood) photos (I didn’t have the originals anymore) gone forever, without warning, and there’s nothing I can do about it. And I paid for this!?
So think twice before you trust the cloud… or Yahoo. Just my two cents.
Nyancat is back, nya! (ps: was that progress bar always there?)
Exhibit A on how ACTA will be abused/enforced. Except you know, not just removing a video, but potentially destroying a person’s livelihood & professional reputation, even once the “mistake” is sorted out. Which as shown in TFA it is much, much harder (if not impossible) to fix the problem than it is to create it.
This may not seem that big a deal, but there’s a more sinister side to this. If you go on youtube and search for ‘tiananmen square protests’ you’ll find a documentary in 20 parts called ‘gate of heavenly peace’ – parts 12-19 (the part with the massacre) are unavailable due to a copyright claim by some obscure Pakistani TV station. Elsewhere somebody else has uploaded the same film in 22 parts, but the same parts are missing. Looks like repressive regimes can even censor the rest of the world’s internet.
I’m going to get flamed for defending Youtube, but here goes:
How on earth do you expect them to identify which takedown requests are valid and which are not when over 48 hours of video is uploaded to Youtube every minute? It is a completely unfeasable task for an actual person to individually watch every flagged vid.
http://youtube-global.blogspot.com/2011/05/thanks-youtube-community-for-two-big.html
My recommendations to Youtube:
1) Do a bit of background chekcing when a video has an insanely large ammount of views.
2) Delete accounts of or ban users who have made repeated (i.e. more than 2) fraudulent takedown requests.
“How on earth do you expect them to identify which takedown requests are valid and which are not when over 48 hours of video is uploaded to Youtube every minute?”
I agree that YouTube’s job is difficult, but the amount of video footage uploaded per minute isn’t relevant here. It’s just the takedown requests, and their rebuttals, that YouTube need to look at.
We had an Android game on the Google Market hit with a DMCA request a few days ago. The DMCA sender, who is in China, has a game with the same origin as we have for our version of the game (we both have licenses from the original game creator).
I filed a counter notification. It doesn’t require in the DMCA to say in the counter notification why we’re filing a counter notice but Google required that we give our reasoning for filing the notice.
In any event the DMCA requires that the content be re-enabled no less than 10 days later and no more than 14 days. So any DMCA request has a 10-14 day window where your content/server/whatever will be offline.
That’s a good point, if YouTube doesn’t restore a video within 14 days, you may actually be able to lawyer up against YouTube for not restoring the video – and, my understanding is that they have to restore it once counternotified, regardless of whether it’s fair use or not. At that point, the only option is for the person who filed the takedown notice to sue you.