FTFY

Do they even have a Youtube channel?

I don’t know who is worse, the MPAA copy-troll douche burgers or Google and it’s capitulamatic roll-over reflexes. 

You sell all the widgets you make to Mega-Mart, who pays you for said widgetry.
Now, some company who had nothing to do with any of the above process approaches Mega-Mart and claims they’re owed money on your widgets.  Oh, you can keep making your widgets, but Mega-Mart is going to be writing the checks to THEM now.  Sound like theft now?   If not, what the hell do you call it?

The system is so broken. 

The best part is that Google gets other people to do the dirty work for them and Google can claim they had nothing to do with it. How was Google supposed to know that video was fair use? How was Google supposed to know that content was public domain? Oh, please.

Google’s massive 500 million dollar fine they got for knowingly serving up illegal pharmaceutical ads didn’t seem to be a big enough deterrant. Unfortunately, the media will continue to turn a blind eye when Google does something bad so long as Google keeps cutting them a check every month for serving up ads.

Want to do something about it? Stop serving Google ads on your website. Does boingboing care enough about this issue to stop taking money from Google? I doubt it.

The RIAA/MPAA cartels argue that piracy = theft because pirates steal away rightsholders’ ability to profit from content they own.  The idea breaks down, however, because when you copy something, the original is generally still there, so it’s hard to argue it’s “stolen.”   The pirate doesn’t steal the content itself.  The rightsholder at least still has the ability to compete with the pirate for buyers of his content.

This ContentID scam gets one step closer to the traditional notion of theft, because by forcing the original off the tubes (or forcing the rightsholder to accept advertising for someone else’s benefit), the bad guys are actually preventing the rightsholder from using his content for his own benefit.    That sounds a lot more like theft to me than the guy on the corner selling bootleg DVDs.

(A few years ago, newly minted attorneys started having difficulty finding jobs in their field, as many of the grunt work jobs have been replaced by “expert systems”)

This speaks to a larger ongoing problem of where us little guys and gals have little recourse against the contentID elite. And unfortunately there’s little to no negative recourse towards making frivolous contentID claims against content, nor does there seem to be a means in which contentID members have to prove they actually own content they’re claiming. 

I wonder how many millions of dollars in ad revenue are being misdirected away from legitimate creators to companies that abuse the system. I’m sure I’m in the minority that actually fight these claims – many people don’t and just give their potential revenue away to somebody else.

How does anyone claim that public domain footage is “mine”? Google, etc should have a policy where any footage tagged as “public domain” may not have any advertising, and is not subject to take-down notices, unless it is not actually public domain.