by Chaosmap on October 16, 2008
Presidential candidate John McCain is protesting what he feels is an unwarranted removal of several of his Presidential campaign videos from the popular social media and video sharing site, YouTube.
YouTube LLC removed the videos last week in response to several take-down requests claiming violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. (DMCA) According to ComputerWorld.com, a letter sent to the company by the McCain campaign Monday called for a special review process to examine the legal merit of take-down requests specifically associated with presidential candidates and their campaigns.
“Overreaching copyright claims have resulted in the removal of non-infringing campaign videos from YouTube, thus silencing political speech,” says the McCain campaign in the YouTube letter,
…which goes on to say that the short clips of news broadcast segments contained within the campaign videos are under ten seconds and are noncommercial uses of the material, and therefore do not violate the DMCA.
YouTube LLC responded via a letter sent to the McCain campaign yesterday saying that it is not a “viable solution to perform a substantial legal review of every DMCA take-down notice.”
by Chaosmap on September 16, 2008
September 16, 2008
At what Sen. Joseph Lieberman (I-Conn). is calling his request, YouTube Inc. has updated its acceptable content guidelines to effectively ban videos with the potential to incite violence.
The video uploading and social media site had previously turned down a request from chairman of the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental affairs to remove videos produced and sponsored by terrorists which showed assassinations, deaths of US soldiers, and other violent acts.
The new guidelines, which state that “predatory behavior, stalking, threats, harassment, intimidation, invading privacy, revealing other people’s personal information, and inciting others to commit violent acts or to violate the terms of use are taken very seriously.”
Sen. Lieberman is also asking Google, Inc, the parent company of YouTube, to remove all videos that have been created by terrorist organizations, whether they violate the guidelines or not.
While some are in favor of the new guidelines, others believe that they infringe on the right to free speech, and that Internet-based sites should be free of governmental intervention. Some people, like CEO of IT research firm Techdirt Inc, Mike Masnick, question the lasting effectiveness of banning terrorist produced videos from being posted to YouTube.
“Those videos will quickly pop back up on other sites that won’t take them down,” Masnick told ComputerWorld.com in an interview this week. “Second, most of those videos are preaching to the choir. It’s highly unlikely that very many people are being recruited by terrorists’ causes by a grainy video on YouTube.”
Failure to adhere to the new video submission guidelines could result in a permanent banning from YouTube.
