viz. - copyright

YouTube & Fair Use (Part II)

snelson — Fri, 12 Aug 2011 03:29:37 +0000

Image Credit: Scott Nelson, Creative Commons, Attribute, Share-Alike

Last week, I addressed only the first stages in a YouTube copyright dispute. Should a copyright holder wish to issue a Digital Millennium Copyright Act takedown notice, the process is a bit more involved. This past year, the company introduced the YouTube Copyright School, a kind of “traffic school” for copyright violations. If a user receives a copyright violation notice, she is forced to watch a five-minute cartoon about copyright and complete ten questions regarding the content. As I mentioned above, on the third such copyright notice, the user is banned from uploading to YouTube for life. YouTube commissioned the creators of The Happy Tree Friends to craft the video tutorial, and so far, the video has received over half a million views, with around 1600 likes and five times as many dislikes. While the video certainly informs users of their rights and responsibilities under copyright, it uses visual rhetoric to present copyright law as frightening and complicated. Such a characterization contributes to the chilling effect on using copyrighted content to create YouTube videos.

The choice of the Happy Tree Friends is an interesting one. The cute woodland animals are not without controversy, as they have been attacked by parents’ groups for their depictions of violence. What’s more interesting for the purposes of this post, though, is that the Happy Tree Friends themselves couldn’t exist without Fair Use protections, yet they star in a cartoon that gives short shrift to users’ fair use rights. Compare the characters Lumpy and Splendid with another famous moose and flying squirrel.

Image Credit: Steve Eighinger & the Happy Tree Friends Wiki

The similarities are intentional, and I’m sure the creators of Happy Tree Friends would claim parody protections under Fair Use. Their cartoons, after all, are a cross between Rocky & Bullwinkle and The Itchy & Scratchy Show from The Simpsons. In their normal cartoons, the Happy Tree Friends dismember each other and fall victim to many industrial accidents. They’ve cleaned up their act a bit for the YouTube Copyright School, though.

The YouTube Copyright School video centers around Russell, a pirate sea otter who can’t seem to avoid violating copyright law. He captures video in a theater with his smartphone, films a live performance, and even attempts a mashup using his own puppetry set to copyrighted music. Only when he creates his own song for his final video does he avoid the narrator’s ire, and when he creates original content, he has “the right to post [the video] to YouTube."

The video addresses three situations where Russell has violated copyright, and gives only one scenario where he would avoid getting strikes against him: “by singing an original song” and “creating [his] own content”

While this is one scenario when copyright law would not be violated, the video fails to account for other forms content creation that would fall under Fair Use, and specifically places mashups in the “violates copyright” category, though that debate is far from over.

YouTube does address Fair Use in the context of mashups, but the visual and aural rhetoric is designed to mystify users and dissuade them from using copyrighted material. From cute scenarios acted out by the characters, we get a quick 23-second treatment of Fair Use, and this treatment is far from fair.

Fair Use literally forces its way onto the screen and crushes the main character. The narrator then reads through some legalese explaining fair use at a speed normally reserved for the end of commercials, where the fine print exculpates a company for any injuries sustained from the product. The speed at which it’s read coupled with its violent entry and intimidating wall of text paint Fair Use in a scary light, something reserved for lawyers and judges and not the laypeople of YouTube. This visual message is clear: Fair Use is dangerous and unintelligible, so you shouldn’t concern yourself with it anyway.

YouTube’s Copyright School chooses to make the rights of copyright holders seem simple, while portraying the rights of users, mashup artists, remixers, and home video enthusiasts as abstract and complex. In its defense, YouTube began offering a Creative Commons licensing option for uploaded videos, so it is stepping in the right direction to allow users to share their creations (though, at the time of this posting, there is no option to disallow commercial use of uploaded creative commons videos). YouTube’s reasoning behind their rhetoric is somewhat understandable, as Google is a company attempting to protect themselves against further litigation from copyright holders like Viacom and Fox. However, YouTube is a site that built itself on user-generated content, and as such, it owes its users a fair representation of current copyright law. YouTube’s Copyright School presents a skewed version of copyright, one which tips the balance in favor of owners over culture and public domain. Such portrayals can have a chilling effect on participatory media, where Fair Use is exercised less and less because people are frightened by possible ramifications.

YouTube & Fair Use

snelson — Mon, 01 Aug 2011 21:07:38 +0000

Recently, one of my YouTube videos was automatically removed for "copyright violations." I decided to take a closer look into YouTube's policies and found they may be dissuading users from exercising their Fair Use rights.

In partnership with Megan Varelmann and Vincent Robert-Nicoud, I created a video illustrating a few of Lev Manovich’s concepts from The Language of New Media. The scene YouTube found questionable was an illustration of the Language of Selection through a clip of the

IKEA scene from Fight Club:

Our use of this clip was in my mind well within Fair Use, so I filed a dispute. The video was restored within a week, but it got me thinking about some of the silencing effects from YouTube’s automated system and their approach to “educating” consumer-producers (or “prosumers,” to use Alvin Toffler’s term). The visual rhetoric of both the interface for filing a dispute and the cartoon copyright violators are forced to watch subtly argue for copyright as mainly for owners’ rights, rather than a balance between owners’ and users’ rights.

First, though, a bit of clarification on YouTube’s policies. In 2007, Viacom, Inc. brought a $1 billion lawsuit against YouTube for mass copyright infringement. Viacom argued that YouTube knowingly allowed users to upload copyrighted content, and Viacom wanted its share of the multibillion-dollar pie that is YouTube. In 2010, Google (the owner of YouTube) won the case, but only because the judge ruled YouTube is protected underneath the “safe harbor” provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. In these provisions, online service providers are protected “from liability for information posted or transmitted by subscribers if they quickly remove or disable access to material identified in a copyright holder's complaint." Thus arose YouTube’s fairly recent measures to remove offending content.

YouTube created their Content Verification Program, where copyright holders could submit material to a database that YouTube uses to automatically screen uploaded videos. A match from the database then means the copyright owner can block, track, or monetize the content. Blocking the content automatically removes the video. Tracking allows the owner to keep an eye on the offending video for future action. Finally, the most controversial option allows the owner to “monetize” the offending video by placing ads around it. All of these options happen automatically (and impressively, from a computing standpoint – see this TED talk for a brief explanation of the system). That is, there is no human intervention in these stages, and there have been numerous complaints about YouTube’s crawlers assuming an offense before the facts are reviewed, especially since three violations equals a blocked channel. Even Lady Gaga ran afoul of this automated system when her channel was temporarily suspended for posting videos of her own copyrighted music performances. Fear not, though, humans: we can still petition our machine overlords.

If a video is flagged, users then have the option to dispute the automatic takedown for one of three reasons: 1. the Content ID program made a mistake (the video contains no copyrighted material); 2. the user doesn’t need the owner’s permission to use the content (the portion used falls under Fair Use); or 3. the user has the owner’s permission to use the copyrighted content. When a user files a dispute, YouTube automatically restores the video, but the user has just made herself legally liable should the copyright owner choose to sue for infringement.

If you’re feeling a bit confused, you aren’t alone. The process can be somewhat daunting for a casual YouTube user, and this is only the first stage in copyright complaints. Further, the dispute form uses some interface choices that serve to silence the user’s input into the process. The takedown notices from YouTube are vague, giving only a short statement that in my case read “Your video, Visualizing Manovich's New Media, may have content that is owned or licensed by FOX. No action is required on your part; however, if you are interested in learning how this affects your video, please visit the Content ID Matches section of your account for more information.” Of course, no action was required on my part had I chosen to not dispute their claim.

But I did want to dispute their claim. The video in question was made for a class, and I stood to gain nothing financially from challenging their claim. However, I wanted to exercise my Fair Use rights and learn more about this process. When I visited the Content ID Matches section to dispute the takedown, I was informed by YouTube that the length of the copyrighted material may not matter. While this is technically correct, the length also may matter in Fair Use disputes. On many other pages about copyright on YouTube, the company takes a hands-off approach, stating they “can't give [me] advice on either of these topics [i.e., Fair Use and Fair Dealing], and if [I] do plan to use even a small portion of copyrighted material in [my] video [YouTube would] strongly advise [me] to take legal advice first." But here, YouTube makes a point to tell users that the length used may not matter, thus pre-empting a common conception about copyright that may actually hold true.

YouTube cautions against frivolous disputes, as such actions could make me legally liable in civil suits (and should the “10 Strikes Bill” circulating in the Senate pass, possible criminal penalties in the future). However, it’s a computer program that chose to flag my video without any context to the situation, and thus no consideration of Fair Use rights. The program works in the owners’ favor by acting first and asking questions later, presuming guilt instead of innocence. Say, for example, that Fox had wanted to monetize my video instead of blocking it. Would Fox still receive revenue from my video between the time it was flagged and the time I acted to dispute the claim?

Even beyond the advantage given to complainants by YouTube’s Content ID system, the notice gave too little information to mount a thorough counterclaim. All YouTube told me was that my video contained some material copyrighted by Fox. My video actually contained clips from four other films, and only by searching the Internet Movie Database did I learn Fight Club was the only one Fox owns. In the larger arena of mashups, parodies, and home videos, a single uploaded video could contain a lot of copyrighted material that falls under Fair Use. What parts did YouTube’s Content ID system match? Was it a clip from a film? The television program running in the background of my humorous cat video? A couple of bars from a song? To effectively argue a position, both parties need information, and the current YouTube system hands more information to the owners while limiting the information given to users.

The dispute process interface further reinforces this imbalance of information. If the user files a dispute based upon Fair Use, YouTube gives the option of one small text field to explain the use:

In my case, I explained how my video fared under each aspect of the four-part test, and the text went well beyond the field given. Thus, it was difficult to edit my text and added to my frustration with the entire process. If the copyright holder rejects the dispute, though, no explanation is needed whatsoever. The user only receives a notice that the claim is rejected.

While YouTube doesn’t deny users their Fair Use rights, as such a practice would be illegal, they certainly frame the debate in such a way to make exercising Fair Use difficult. YouTube’s Content ID system is designed to shield YouTube from liability in copyright cases, and it’s understandable that any company would want to do so. YouTube must sift through the twenty hours of video uploaded each minute. Mistakes in such a massive system are inevitable, and I’m amazed by YouTube’s programmers for even being able to address such a large dataset. However, even when “educating” the public about copyright, YouTube errs on the side of copyright for owners’ rights. Next week, I’ll address YouTube’s Copyright School, a kind of “traffic school” for those it deems “copyright violators.”

DJ Spooky's Sound Unbound lecture

catherine_c — Wed, 13 Oct 2010 13:09:00 +0000

Image Credit: DJ Spooky's Website

In the wake of DJ Spooky's Sound Unbound rip mix burn lecture here at UT yesterday evening, I'd like to recap some of the topics covered last night. DJ Spooky's discussion of remixing, music and sound, art, and space and global adventuring resonate particularly well with recent discussions here on viz. Above is a representation of global ocean currents that DJ Spooky presented as the inspiration for his symphonies on ice.

Yesterday evening DJ Spooky discussed a little bit about a wide variety of his work (mainly his music and his writing) and his inspirations. From playing an old battle rap featuring Run DMC and discussing the history of experimental music and the remix from noise compositions to Stravinsky's national anthem - which Spooky points out got him arrested, though essentially the same act earned Hendrix wide acclaim at Woodstock - Spooky's lecture focused on the ways in which sounds can be changed, the dilemmas of copyright law, as discussed in the documentary film Copyright Criminals featuring Spooky among other artists (view the preview below).

Image Credit: Stravinsky's Mugshot, from Rate My Band

Spooky also talked a great deal about space and place and its effects on our ways of approaching music and sound. He discussed his escape from his usual influences in New York and his recent trips to both Antarctica and the North Pole. Spooky's global adventurings play a significant role in his explorations of music and remixing.

Image Credit: DJ Spooky at the North Pole, from his Facebook photos

Spooky also discussed the influence of graphic design on his outlook on remixing. He explained that design is a forum where drawing from a variety of influences is expected -- a topic discussed recently in viz by Noel and even discussed his interest in and use of QR tags to enhance public spaces, a topic I discussed in my entry last week.

Image Credit: Viewers interacting with a DJ Spooky QR tag at Art Basel 2010, from Mickie Quick's Flickr Photostream

All in all, DJ Spooky's visit made for an inspiring evening that wrapped up with some fantastic questions on the meaning of the remix, the significance of the act of remixing different types of media, and the future of music distribution. DJ Spooky brought up a wide variety of topics, and his lecture flowed through a number of contemporary debates and their historical contexts. In conclusion, I'll leave you with the preview for the Copyright Criminals documentary that DJ Spooky played last night:

Challenging a Youtube Video Take Down

noelradley — Fri, 30 Apr 2010 18:58:31 +0000

Image Credit: Know Your Meme H/T Hampton Finger

This youtube video explains the difference between fair use and copyright infringement involving Youtube videos. It also shows how to dispute the take-down of your video on Youtube, if you have created a fair use work.

Guide to Citation and Images

noelradley — Sat, 27 Mar 2010 17:34:50 +0000

Image Credit: Arriving at the Horizon Via Clinamen

These pages will provide information or intellectual property and images. Part of visual literacy is becoming aware of our legal rights to the images we use and create. The links below are a starting point for understanding what is fair use for images, how to create Works Cited, and how to produce mediated content with images. Additionally, some of the links show examples of mediated content, where images are very effectively sourced and cited.

For a brief overview of citation and templates for how to create a works cited, see the Guide to Citing Images from Viz.

Sites for Intellectual Property and Citation

Basic information for citing an image from The University of Cincinnati

Examples of Effectively Sourced Images

On Violence Against Objects" by David J. Staley, See the Index Page [Viz. Review]

"Writing Technologies" by Alex Reid at the University of Buffalo [Viz. Review]

Clinamen Blog by James J. Brown at Wayne State [Viz. Review]

'Sita Sings the Blues' released on web with CC license

John Jones — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 20:28:35 +0000

If you haven’t yet heard about Sita Sings the Blues, then I’ll let Roger Ebert introduce you to it:

It hardly ever happens this way. I get a DVD in the mail. I'm told it's an animated film directed by "a girl from Urbana." That's my home town. It is titled "Sita Sings the Blues." I know nothing about it, and the plot description on IMDb is not exactly a barn-burner: An animated version of the epic Indian tale of Ramayana set to the 1920's jazz vocals of Annette Hanshaw. Uh, huh. I carefully file it with other movies I will watch when they introduce the 8-day week.

After Ebert decides to watch it he writes:

I am enchanted. I am swept away. I am smiling from one end of the film to the other. It is astonishingly original. It brings together four entirely separate elements and combines them into a great whimsical chord. You might think my attention would flag while watching An animated version of the epic Indian tale of Ramayana set to the 1920's jazz vocals of Annette Hanshaw. Quite the opposite. It quickens. I obtain Nina Paley's e-mail address and invite the film to my film festival in April 2009 at the University of Illinois, which by perfect synchronicity is in our home town.

To get any film made is a miracle. To conceive of a film like this is a greater miracle. How did Paley's mind work? She begins with the story of Ramayana, which is known to every school child in India but not to me. It tells the story of a brave, noble woman who was made to suffer because of the perfidy of a spineless husband and his mother. This is a story known to every school child in America. They learn it at their mother's knee. Paley depicts the story with exuberant drawings in bright colors. It is about a prince named Rama who treated Sita shamefully, although she loved him and was faithful to him.

Despite rave reviews like this one,--and winning a Silver Bear at the Berlin Film Festival--Paley’s film has remained unavailable to most people because she was unable to clear the rights to the songs she used in the film, and the cost securing those rights scared off most distributors. Fortunately, some of these issues have been resolved, and the film is now being released to a wider audience.

If you live in New York, WNET/NY will be airing Sita on Saturday, March 7 at 10:45 (thereby atoning for this). In the meantime, you can watch the entire film online via WNET’s streaming player or download the film to watch at your leisure.

Update: here's the trailer from YouTube:

MIT project documents videos removed from YouTube

John Jones — Wed, 21 May 2008 16:38:01 +0000

CNET reports MIT has a new project that provides information about videos that have been removed from YouTube. From the article:

The site, an effort by the MIT Free Culture group, scans the most popular YouTube videos for the metadata Google inserts after a video has been taken down. YouTomb shows a list of recently removed videos (which you can’t actually view), who requested their removal, when they were taken down, and how long they were up beforehand.

This site should be a helpful resource for online video researchers, particularly those interested in copyright issues.

Flickr hosts LOC photos; Smithsonian next?

John Jones — Sat, 19 Jan 2008 19:01:47 +0000

The Library of Congress has created its own Flickr homepage and posted 3,000 public-domain photos to the site. This first collection of the LOC’s 14 million images is part of a pilot project called “The Commons.” The images are labeled with the photographer’s name and short descriptions, but the LOC is relying on Flickr’s users to provide tags for the images.

This is a fantastic idea. Not only is it great for the public, who will have easier access to these images, it should be great for the LOC, who are offloading to resource-intensive tasks—cataloguing and hosting the images—to a service that will do them both for free.

In the first case, the ease of use and popularity of Flickr can only be an improvement on the LOC’s previous efforts to post their images. A few months ago I played around with the LOC American Memory Project site while I was researching a post on visual resources for teaching Border Studies. This site isn’t nearly as full-featured or easy to navigate as Flickr, so moving the images to that service can only make them more accessible.

As for the second point, I’m sure it would be ideal for librarians to to do all of the tagging of these photos, but, having provided the catalogue information, I think this job could be easily completed by volunteers at Flickr. Additionally, while notices have primarily focused on the ability of users to tag these photos, what about Flickr’s other features, like locating the images on a map? In short, I think the accessibility and informational benefits that Flickr provides are going to greatly increase the value of these images to both the LOC and everyone else.

This is a great move by the LOC. Hopefully, other government agencies will follow their lead. (Over at Boing Boing, Cory Doctorow has posted some analysis by “Rogue archivist” Carl Malamud, who argues that the Smithsonian should follow the LOC’s lead and get Flickr to host their images a well.)

Shirts deemed in bad taste because of "Animal rights, stuff like that"

Jillian Sayre — Tue, 16 Oct 2007 01:21:31 +0000

Earlier this month, a Texas Tech fraternity found themselves victims of their school's solicitation section of the code of conduct. One of the students in the fraternity was selling t-shirts to raise school spirits for the A&M game. The shirts echoed the (strange) A&M motto "Gig 'Em!" with the more timely "Vick 'Em!" The back of the shirt had a football player wearing the number 7 (Vick's number) hanging the Aggie mascot Reveille by a rope:
Texas Tech halted the sale of the t-shirts; citing the code of conduct, the school said it doesn't allow the sale of material that is "derogatory, inflammatory, insensitive, or in such bad taste." The student in question argued that he planned to donate part of the profits a local animal defense league because of "Animal Rights, stuff like that." I guess when it comes to obscenity, like Justice Stewart, those administers "know it when they see it."

This reminds me of the Aggie's "Saw 'Em Off" campaign, ended by a UT lawsuit alleging copyright infringement and solved by the following alteration:

and then there's UT's reprisal:

I think the "Vick 'Em" case is an interesting move in the string of violence against mascots because the case is the first one that deemed truly offensive. Fed by this cartoon violence, this shirt crossed the line in referencing the very real abuse documented in the Vick case. The threat indicated in the other shirts reference real animals (Bevo and Reveille) but somehow the mascots themselves remain at the level of representation. It is the Vick in Vick Em that has everybody in an uproar.

Invasion of the fashion snatchers: copyright or class conflict?

Jillian Sayre — Wed, 26 Sep 2007 23:51:10 +0000

This week the Village Voice reported that Anthropolgie is joining the legion of designers suing Forever 21, the chain that (re)produces trendy looks for the masses (read: their clothes are really cheap). Anna Sui campaigned against the store during Fashion Week (she handed out t shirts with the store's owners on a "wanted" poster) and Diane Von Furstenberg is lobbying Congress to "improve" copyright law when it comes to fashion.

DVF dress on the left, Forever 21 on the right

The chain, these designers argue, is too close for comfort on some of its clothes and it seems like the haute couture is determined to keep the hoi polloi out of their closets. But what is at stake here? Currently, you CANNOT copyright a dress, and many are suspicious of this debate because fashion has always looked to others for inspiration. So the designers focus on the details - like fabric instead of cut or resemblance to their trademark (Gwen Stefani). DVF's lawyers are actually arguing that someone might think that they are buying an original when they go for these knockoffs, but anyone paying $33 instead of $350 knows that this isn't just about getting a great deal. I think this has more to do with social capital than actual capital - no one I know who shops at Forever 21 (and I know a few) is choosing the store over a designer boutique: they don't have access to those modes of acquisition. Perhaps what scares these designers the most is the accessibility argued by the availability of their designs. By claiming copyright infringement and a "take back the dress" mentality, these designers are not only making claims of ownership over the clothes but over the clientele as well.