Wednesday, July 18, 2012

Music publisher uses DMCA to take down Romney ad of Obama crooning; ArsTechnica, 7/16/12

Timothy B. Lee, ArsTechnica; Music publisher uses DMCA to take down Romney ad of Obama crooning:

"But YouTube chief counsel Zahavah Levine fired back with a letter pointing out that trying to assess fair use on a case-by-case basis at YouTube's scale would be extremely difficult. In many cases, YouTube doesn't even have the information it would need to assess whether a particular clip is fair use. Given that declining to take down a clip could expose the site to liability, YouTube has decided to play it safe and comply with the DMCA's takedown procedure. No exceptions, even for presidential candidates.

In 2008, YouTube expressed the hope that whichever candidate won the White House would help to reform the DMCA's takedown process to avoid this kind of problem. Unfortunately, that didn't happen. Instead, Congress nearly passed the Stop Online Piracy Act, which would have given incumbent copyright holders even broader powers to take down content they didn't like."

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