Posts tagged as:

YouTube

…better get ready for the YouTube takedown demands — or for efforts to obtain the identity of you as the poster [Popehat]

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YouTube, Flickr in peril?

by Walter Olson on November 10, 2011

Concerns are mounting about something called the Stop Online Piracy Act, billed as giving authorities the power to close down “rogue” websites devoted to exchange of stolen content. [Timothy Lee, Cato at Liberty]

The Senate Judiciary Committee has unanimously approved S. 978, a bill that would raise from a misdemeanor to a felony the unauthorized performance or streaming of a copyrighted work when the infringement takes place at least ten times and either reaps $2,500 or more in revenue, or avoids the payment of license fees whose fair market value would exceed $5,000. Mike Masnick at TechDirt thinks the bill could wind up authorizing the jailing of some persons who embed YouTube videos or post videos of themselves lip-synching hit tunes; CopyHype defends the bill and dismisses the concerns as overblown.

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After a video went viral showing a distracted shopper walking into a mall fountain, it’s not clear that much of anyone would have known that the blurry figure was Ms. Marrero. They know now, though, as her lawyer talks about holding someone “responsible” for the less-than-professional reaction of security, which included laughing and not going up to her to confirm that she wasn’t hurt. [Mediaite, Balasubramani, Salon, Popehat, MSNBC "Technolog", Mystal]

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The New York Times tells of a Beverly Hills, Calif. student who

videotaped friends at a cafe, egging them on as they laughed and made mean-spirited, sexual comments about another eighth-grade girl, C. C., calling her “ugly,” “spoiled,” a “brat” and a “slut.” J. C. posted the video on YouTube. The next day, the school suspended her for two days.

Now, before clicking the link, guess who collected the resulting $107,150.80. Right. Ken at Popehat thinks the judge decided the case in favor of the right party, more or less, which doesn’t keep the right party from also being a deplorably wrong party (strong language, invective, etc.)

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May 10 roundup

by Walter Olson on May 10, 2010

  • Failure to warn? “Non-Child Sues For Slide-Related Injury” [Lowering the Bar]
  • “AG Cuomo Sues Lawyer for Fraud, Says He Sold His Name to Debt Collector for $141K” [ABA Journal]
  • Ted Frank on his move to the Manhattan Institute and Point of Law [CCAF]
  • “Viacom is becoming a lawsuit company instead of a TV company” [Doctorow, BoingBoing]
  • UK: “NHS pays £10,000 to family of psychiatric patient who committed suicide” [Times Online]
  • American Cancer Society: federal advisory panel’s chemicals-cause-cancer alarms are overblown [NYTimes] More: Taranto, WSJ.
  • “Who Knew Bankruptcy Paid So Well?” [NYTimes]
  • Famed sleuth Bloomberg Holmes on the case: was the Pathfinder headed for a vile sodium den? [IowaHawk]

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April 2 roundup

by Walter Olson on April 2, 2010

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Apparent theory: YouTube should screen and monitor everything before it goes up. [TechDirt, American Lawyer, Jim Harper/Cato at Liberty, New York Times]

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You may have seen some of them before, but probably not all six unless you hang out on YouTube a lot. [Erin Geiger Smith and William Wei, Business Insider]

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Bloomberg reports that the trial in Italy is going forward

on charges related to a clip uploaded to Google Video in 2006.

The clip was created and posted on the Web by a group of students at a Turin school, who filmed themselves bullying a disabled classmate. Google says that it removed the video as soon as it was notified and that it helped Italian police identify those responsible. The trial has been closed to the media at Google’s request.

“Seeking to hold neutral platforms liable for content posted on them is a direct attack on a free, open Internet,” Google spokesman William Echikson said in June.

More: AP.

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Salvatore (”Toto”) Cuffaro, a senator from Sicily, doesn’t seem to take well to criticism. [BoingBoing]

YouTube takedowns

by Walter Olson on February 4, 2009

They’re accelerating: Teenagers singing “Winter Wonderland” should not expect their videos to stay up. (Fred von Lohmann, EFF, via Ron Coleman).

TV’s biggest lawyer-advertiser is Boston’s James Sokolove, whose ad budget of $20 million/year makes him a widely recognized figure (and much parodized on YouTube). He’s reportedly offered $1,500 apiece for mesothelioma leads, seen his name in an episode of “The Sopranos”, and even advertised for patent plaintiffs. Turns out he hasn’t seen the inside of a courtroom in nearly thirty years, instead farming out his callers to others. [Boston mag via Ambrogi] “The message behind his ads, he says, is simple: Injured? Free money.”

Now his Sokolove Charitable Fund is giving him a shot at new respectability with help from no less august an institution than Stanford Law School (thank you, Prof. Deborah Rhode), It’s bankrolling something called the Roadmap to Justice Project, which will push the much-criticized-in-this-space “Civil Gideon” idea (a newly invented Constitutional entitlement to taxpayer coverage of lawyers’ fees in civil lawsuits).

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Hello, and thanks again to Walter Olson for welcoming me back to help fill in this week. His prior post reminded me of this surveillance tape I’ve kept after all these years simply for comic relief.

The tape shows one customer casually stroll through the door without incident all the while another intending customer in quite the hurry tries to run in–he thought–through an open door. Instead, it was the plate glass adjacent to the door. He smacks into it bowing the glass and then storms into the store while the other customers gawk at him. The original clip was without sound but I couldn’t resist jazzing it up with Gonna Fly Now from Rocky.

Here’s the Overlawyered part: he made a claim against the store owner; and, the claim was paid as a compromise. Part of the reason why is visible on the video—can you see it?

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They seem now to be part of the accepted armament of campaign law. “Of course the McCain-Palin team could counter-notify, but the DMCA’s 10-14 business day waiting period makes that option next to useless, when ‘10 days can be a lifetime in a political campaign.’” (Seltzer/Citizen Media Law, Levy/CL&P; but see Ron Coleman, Oct. 15: process need not be as slow as waiting period implies).

Related: Does trademark law allow candidates to suppress some types of opposition keyword advertising, as when candidates put up negative ads keyed to each others’ names? [Levy/CL&P]

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YouTube received a flurry of takedown notices, but “quickly realized something was fishy, and began investigating.” It “rapidly became clear” that the entities filing the takedown demands “did not hold the copyrights to the materials they claimed to be infringed, including footage from a Clearwater City Commission meeting and a man-on-the-street interview. In addition, many of these videos were obvious fair uses, such as independent news reports.” (Eva Galperin, Electronic Frontier Foundation, Sept. 25)(via Ardia).

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This one ends differently than most (Lessig Blog, Sept. 22 via TechDirt & O’Keefe).

Benjamin Legeri, a/k/a BennyBaby, wants $1 million in damages, saying he wouldn’t have posted sketch and parody videos had he known he wouldn’t get a chance to be cut in on the ad revenue. (David Chartier, “YouTube user sues Google for his slice of the traffic”, Ars Technica, Aug. 15).