Image taken on 2008-04-06 12:03:27 by Thomas Hawk.
More Crappy Censorship From Your Friends at Yahoo!
Image taken on 2008-04-06 12:03:27 by Thomas Hawk.
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{ 19 comments… read them below or add one }
Hmmm… not cool.
really cool stuff, tom
Yahoo is getting what they deserve. Ineptitude of this degree begs a thorough shake up.
Extremely unlikely that the Microsoft purchase will improve anything.
Agreed. The DMCA gets too easily taken as an absolute, never to be questioned writ. Anyone can make a claim; doesn’t mean it’s true.
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Seen in my contacts’ photos.
Companies are legally obligated to honor DCMA takedown notices in order to get the safe harbor protections from user infringement that the law stipulates. If Feldman doesn’t like it he can host his own crappy videos.
Flickr can certainly do better on the implementation, though. For instance, instead of immediately deleting a photo, flag it private and lock it that way. Then when it turns out they made yet another stupid mistake, they can just unflag it and no harm done.
Companies are legally obligated to honor DCMA takedown notices in order to get the safe harbor protections from user infringement that the law stipulates.
They are not legally obligated to honor bogus DMCA takedown notices. For instance they are not *obligated* to take down 100% of your photos if I wrote them and told them that they were all my copyrighted images.
I’m not opposed to DMCA. I’m opposed to turning over its implementation to half brained idiots.
another sad but true Y! f*ckup
sellout 2 Y! was a huge mistake
Any company has 24 hours to comply or they become liable for any of their users’ infringement.
Sounds like your problem is with the law, not Yahoo’s implementation of it.
If you have a problem with the law, fine. Lots of people do. But wailing about a multinational company following US law seems weak, especially considering what is going on in the world right now. ie – real censorship where lives are at stake, not your friend’s pageviews.
Oh nonsense.
Sounds like your problem is with the law, not Yahoo’s implementation of it.
Automatt, Absolutely wrong. Again, the law does *not* require Yahoo to takedown bogus DMCA requests. This was a bogus DMCA request. My problem is with Yahoo’s *implementation.* I have no problem with the law at all. The law does not require a company to blindly take down anything that anyone requests.
The multinational company Yahoo makes millions of dollars in profit every year. In fact in 2006 Yahoo paid CEO Terry Semel $71 million. Associated Press ranked that as the highest paid CEO in America amongst the 386 that they tracked in that report. This despite Semel’s miserable job as CEO.
seekingalpha.com/article/38020-yahoo-ceo-faces-shareholde…
So when Yahoo is paying their CEO $71 million, yeah, I have a problem when they cut corners and won’t spend the money to do the proper due diligence when getting DMCA takedown notices.
It’s bullshit for Yahoo to just blindly take down every single thing that is requested of them irrespective of whether or not it is really a copyright violation and then blame the DMCA. This is not a problem with the DMCA. This is a problem that Yahoo gives the takedown job to idiots without half a brain or an understanding of copyright law.
Maybe rather than paying their CEO $71 million they should spend some of that money hiring people who understand copyright law to review takedown notices instead.
In this case, the video *clearly* was not copyright violation. Rather than actually examine the video to determine this Yahoo simply pulled it. Why is it fine for them to pay their CEO $71 million for a year’s work but then cut corners when it comes to the users that made their profit possible. They owe their users more than this. And this is not the first time that this has happened. Yahoo needs to re-examine their DMCA policies.
In this case, the video *clearly* was not copyright violation.
Apparently somebody holding a copyright on that song thought it was.
Maybe they were right and maybe they weren’t — frankly, it’s not Yahoo’s call to make. But the copyright holder did testify via affidavit that they thought it was. If that statement was forged, there are legal remedies that can be pursued.
I don’t know if it was infringement or not — I didn’t watch more than 20 seconds before I couldn’t stand it any more. But in our legal system I don’t get to have the final word on if it infringed, and neither do you.
I’d rather have a standard response to DCMA notices that follows the law than put Yahoo employees in the business of adjudicating what is and what is not copyright infringement. It’s just not their call — the law is set up that way.
Apparently somebody holding a copyright on that song thought it was.
And my point is that this is not enough to justify removal of fair use content. Just because any idiot thinks that something violates copyright law doesn’t require it to be removed.
Copyright law is not that complex in many of these cases.
When Flickr removed my content, within an hour I sent them a notice, including permission to use the content from the legitimate copyright owner. This did not matter. The fact that Michael Crook misunderstood copyright law and felt that just because he was in a photo gave him copyright control over a picture should not be my problem.
Even after pointing this bogus request out to Yahoo though my content was still *permanently* removed from the site.
I’d rather have a standard response to DCMA notices that follows the law than put Yahoo employees in the business of adjudicating what is and what is not copyright infringement.
No me. I’d rather Yahoo spend some of that $71 million that they pay their CEO on censors with half a brain and if occasionally a request has to be kicked up to an actual lawyer at Yahoo for an opinon, well, that ought to be the cost of doing business. Clearly when they are making millions and paying their CEO, again $71 million dollars for one years work (more money that 99.9% of people will ever make in their lifetime), I think that they can afford to shoot a request up to a Yahoo lawyer every so often.
Yahoo employees in the business of adjudicating what is and what is not copyright infringement.
How many lawyers work for Yahoo again? I’ll give you a hint. A lot of them.
In your case, Yahoo should have respected the counter-notification portion of the OCILLA, if you sent them one.
Yahoo should have respected the counter-notification portion of the OCILLA
Yahoo never respected anything — even after I notified them that the takedown request was bogus. I never even got an apology after protesting. At some point later I finally badgered Stewart into commenting on the issue and here’s what he said:
"With respect to your posting of the TV screengrab, I don’t think it was a mistake to delete it, but I do think it was (and is) a mistake to not have a mechanism to restore that kind of deletion. (In that case, however, I wouldn’t have asked to have had it restored, since I don’t think posting video stills from TV shows that you didn’t create is what Flickr’s about.)"
So effectively I posted a fair use image to my flickrstream about a newsworthy event (something that thousands of other people do all the time) and Yahoo deleted it after getting a completely bogus DMCA takedown notice and Stewart said that it was not a mistake to delete it or to have my content restored because posting video stills from TV shows that I didn’t create is "not what Flickr is about."
Despite the fact that many, many people at Flickr, including Flickr staff post screen grabs that they did not create all the time.
Yahoo respected shit in my case. I never even got an apology.
Um yeah I can see why that would make you mad and all.
But hey, on the bright side, you could just upload the screen grab again, right? No real damage.
But hey, on the bright side, you could just upload the screen grab again, right?
Yes, but the dozens of people who commented on the previous shot have now all had their voices erased. That’s what I mean by censorship. Flickr is not even obliged to erase the comments and yet not only do they take down the bogus picture, but they erase all of the comments with it. Same thing happened to Rebekka on a photo with over 450 comments.
When people write an opinion, especially on a controversial subject — when they take the time to think about something and pour out their feelings on it in words, and then Yahoo permanently erases all of those words, that is censorship. I don’t buy the DMCA defense there, not one bit.
i think the idea that yahoo actually does permanently delete things is amazing
why don’t they just store everything? i assumed they did and would use any and all of it in their favor later — one of the big selling factors in the patriot act is the control over illegal exchange and tax-evasion business on the internet (the dark side of photo-share sites)
does this mean it is fair to assume that there is actual "permanent" deletion on flickr? i would be relieved at some level if that were true…