YouTube video removed, Dozens of comments lost
Another takedown.
I’m nervous that my YouTube account will soon be suspended but I do not know how to alter my behavior to prevent this outcome without compromising the work I am trying to do. My use of these videos is fair use.
I ripped and re-upped “Ladies First” for a blog post about female MCs back in March because the original poster had disabled embedding. Of the nine videos included in that post, five are now unavailable. The only way to avoid this rapid entropy is to rip and host the videos myself, thus sacrificing the community value of hosting with YouTube.
Curiously, one of the four remaining videos is “Ladies First.” I suspect that there is simply a lag between database instances and the embed will soon be disabled as well. If you click through to the video’s YouTube page, you see this takedown notice:
To quantify the loss, my version of “Ladies First” was viewed approximately 28,212 times and received 38 comments. Here are some excerpts:
May 27
jmsims1228:
this song is great im writing a whole thesis paper on how female rappers went from feminism to sexismAug 26
meghan5631:
Queen Latifah and Monie murdered this track.Even though this song came out about 2 years before I was born,I still think that Q.L and Monie love were the illest female rappers there ever wasNov 27
GodAshe7:
No! The famous ones now are bad indeed. Notice how Latifah had a Politically aware video addressing the injustices in south africa. These dumb ass girls in these videos are mere mindless bodies shaking they ass talking about the same old recycled emotional issues of love, sex and what the man ain’t doin. But The dudes ain’t much better.
I copied these comments out of my email archive. When public viewing of a YouTube video is disabled, all of its comments and response video links are similarly lost.
YouTube should leave comments and responses public after a video is removed.
Tags: academia, comments, copyright, dmca, freeculture, hiphop, musicvideo, research, scholarship, takedown, youtomb, youtube
December 29th, 2008 at 15:05:27 (PST -04:00)
Are you using Chilling Effects DMCA responder?
December 29th, 2008 at 15:09:22 (PST -04:00)
Absolutely. But I am not planning to submit one for a music video that I clearly did not create.
For everyone who has no idea what we’re talking about, Chilling Effects provides a very useful form for responding to DMCA takedowns. I have successfully used it in the past to get videos restored.
http://www.chillingeffects.org/dmca/counter512.pdf
December 29th, 2008 at 17:14:01 (PST -04:00)
second this, strongly:
“YouTube should leave comments and responses public after a video is removed.”
December 29th, 2008 at 17:20:14 (PST -04:00)
We will win this by the Spring 2009.
December 29th, 2008 at 21:35:06 (PST -04:00)
Did you already file a counter-notice to your soulja boy ROFL vid?
Would you argue that’s fair use?
December 31st, 2008 at 01:04:25 (PST -04:00)
Yes and Yes.
1. the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes;
2. the nature of the copyrighted work;
4. the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.