Starting the fire: YouTube audio takedowns
Oh, dear. Check out the notice on this Billy Joel fanvid:
merrickart (1 month ago)
Best video of this song I’ve seen! Even better than Billy Joel’s himself.
Perhaps even more troubling is that the poster wasn’t notified of the takedown:
PlaidFox (16 hours ago)
[...]
To YouTube:
I do not appreciate the way I found out that my audio has been muted by you. I found out because someone had posted it on my video, instead of through a formal e-mail through you. This is very unprofessional and is not appreciated.
It’s possible that the user’s email address is registered incorrectly but I wonder if this is evidence of a software-managed takedown? I can imagine a fingerprinting script muting the audio track before the Copyright Office has time to issue a notice.
Worse still, it appears that the audio from this version of We Didn’t Start The Fire was removed but there isn’t a notice on the video’s page.
Vids by Zbar16, deltasix, SkateTroe, and TheCanadaWiseElder have also been silenced but not all instances of “We Didn’t Start The Fire” have been removed. For example, student videos from phantomgirl2006 and jackinthebox1313 have audio and Username:billyjoel continues to not start the fire.
Several of the videos that parody the lyrics in some fashion are still up. For example, We Didn’t Start The Star Wars, an 80s Boston Sports version or this update:
Has anyone else seen this phenomenon? It has only appeared quite recently.
January 20th, 2008 at 05:26:20 (PST -04:00)
This has happened to me only I did not get a notice!!!!!! I just got silenced!
February 29th, 2008 at 03:09:35 (PST -04:00)
[...] can waffle over whether YouTube’s newly unleashed audio takedown worm will make this activity move elsewhere, but it’ll keep on moving, no doubt. (& I’m [...]
January 14th, 2009 at 16:12:36 (PST -04:00)
in case you haven’t seen this — an interesting shift in strategy?
http://mashable.com/2009/01/14/youtube-mutes-videos/
(oh, looking at delish, i see that you did)
January 14th, 2009 at 16:22:42 (PST -04:00)
it’s not new. as far as i can tell, it’s the same thing i blogged here in dec 07. it just is not widely implemented.
i believe this is because the automated DMCA takedowns cite the VIDEO (audio included.) they would have to create a special boilerplate to request a takedown of the audio alone.
now that they have AudioSwap, i suspect that YT may start pushing this mute option more often.
http://www.youtube.com/audioswap_about
it’s an interesting response to the “dancing baby” case: http://freedomforip.org/category/eff/
but, of course, for anyone who seriously values music as something more than (shudder) CONTENT, audioswap is lulzy and ridiculous.
March 18th, 2009 at 12:02:42 (PDT -04:00)
[...] go “above and beyond” its legal obligations to copyright claimants. Faced with videos silenced and disabled for their transformative use of popular music, vidders like zcatz recorded glum [...]