YouTube Removed 30,000 Japanese Videos from Site 265
Grooves writes "YouTube has been asked to remove almost 30,000 videos from their site, according to reports. The Japan Society for Rights of Authors, Composers and Publishers (JASRAC) found 29,549 videos on the site that had materials contained in them that where not authorized by rights holders. From the article, 'A spokesperson for that organization said that they were considering petitioning YouTube for a better screening process. Although YouTube is legally obligated to remove infringing material when notified, some copyright holders have expressed irritation at the notion that they need to police YouTube themselves.' Now that Google's is attached to the site, will events like this become more commonplace?"
That's unfortunate.... (Score:5, Insightful)
Who didn't see this coming? (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't get it. (Score:5, Insightful)
Why is this news? (Score:3, Insightful)
Tonight @ 11: My bank stops sending me paper statements upon my request! SHOCKING!
...and so it begins (Score:4, Insightful)
Suddenly YouTube is worth a bundle of cash. We all knew it would happen.
All in all, I'd say this is a very gentle way of saying to the **AA that we're going to try to do the right thing.
On second thoughts, they already would have said that in private discussions, behind closed doors.
This is the way to prepare the rest of us. Then it won't seem so bad when they come down like a ton of bricks on the US infringements. It won't hurt their market so much.
police (Score:5, Insightful)
And exactly whose job should that be?
Get Over It. (Score:5, Insightful)
As opposed to the print world, or the spoken world, where... They need to find and notify the authorities of copyright infringement.
I understand the feeling that 'I shouldn't need to do this' that brings up that statement. But it has always been the copyright holder's problem to identify infractions. YouTube is no different in that regard, besides that it brings a lot of creations together in one place.
what copyright provides (Score:5, Insightful)
The power of copyright does not include forcing an obligation onto governments or common carriers to search or police the content. The power of copyright gives the owner a right to take down specific infringing works.
Every scribble, photo, sculpted shape or soundbite you create is copyrighted as soon as you create it. This goes for everybody within the copyright-abiding hemisphere, which obviously means that the number of copyrighted works outnumbers the population by a very large factor. Clearly, not all rights-holders are trying to enforce those rights against every transgression, thankfully. Grouse all you want, but if you own a copyright, you are the only party who should be obligated to do anything about it.
Some carriers might impose a licensing check before submissions can be completed, or they might impose occasional purges like this even without the copyright owners having to complain, but the vast majority of carriers do not (and should not) impose any such hurdle to allowing their users to publish. This is the central promise of public broadcasting and collaboration by network.
If every sheet of paper needed permission before it could hold an idea in ink, we would still be scratching words in the dirt and looking over our shoulders.
Re:Google is goin' down (Score:4, Insightful)
In what bizarro universe did this happen?
Just wait youtube will go the way of p2p
You mean it will make up more than 50% of internet traffic at any given time? Not bad for a start.
They looked... (Score:3, Insightful)
Those Poor Copyright Holders (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't understand (Score:5, Insightful)
Best part is that this process can be easily automated so videos marked as copyrighted by MPIA or similar can be automatically 'copyright marked'. That would create a lot of revenue for artists and a lot of fun for ordinary people.
Shame that they cannot think in this way. Create - not destroy!
Re:Get Over It. (Score:5, Insightful)
The only people who absolutely know that a video contains copyrighted materials are the copyright owners and in this case they have made the identification, YouTube have removed the content and the world is as it should be.
The company involved can complain as much as they like that their copyrighted material should not be distributed in this manner but there is simply no sensible way in which the system can work other than the way it does. Perhaps if you could "fingerprint" every millisecond of video with a unique identifier which could be checked against a copyright database then that would change but I don't think there is any such system in place today.
Re:I don't get it. (Score:3, Insightful)
Cross-Pollination (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Noooooo!!! (Score:5, Insightful)
*cue the "memory lane" ripple dissolve effect with harp strumming*
I remember back when fansubs were scratchy Nth-generation videotapes, converted from Japanese videotapes or recordings from television, with subs added via the chunky digital fonts that ancient camcorders used to caption 1980s wedding videos with. Fan groups in colleges and stuff swapped them quietly amongst themselves. It was usually good enough for viewing the story, but only just, and buying the official release would be a huge leap forward quality-wise. Fansubs weren't competing with the official releases then, you still had a reason to buy the real thing. Nowadays, they're often pretty indistinguishable from a file ripped from a brand new DVD, you can download a copy with the a/v quality just as perfect as the original digital Japanese DVD or TV signal.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Why is it YouTube's job (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Noooooo!!! (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Why is this news? (Score:1, Insightful)
Because, as usual, the Slashdot "editors" were hoping that you'd all work yourselves into some sort of "our rights have been violated" frenzy, which translates into MORE PAGE HITS.
Re:police (Score:5, Insightful)
Traditionally, the government's executive branch is responsible for catching law-breakers, and the judiciary for dealing with them.
On the flip side, copyright infringement is traditionally a civil matter. Recent legislation in some jurisdictions has changed this. Perhaps this fairly recognises that the speed any damage is done today will be vastly faster than the speed of any protracted civil court proceedings, or perhaps it's because of lobbying from Big Media who want to reduce their overheads; take your pick.
I'm not completely decided on this one, but you can certainly understand content providers feeling that the government should act against organisations who, let's be fair, basically run a business model predicated on ripping off those content providers in violation of the law.
Re:Get Over It. (Score:5, Insightful)
no, even google saw it coming. (Score:5, Insightful)
After about 30 seconds of brainstorming, I can imagine google will focus on the social networking users (I already see YouTube making huge headway against MySpace-- watching a video of someone on their profile gives LOADS more parsable clues about them than a few blurry "MySpace Angles" photos), and secondarily attempt to convince many copyright holders to PROMOTE their retail content on YouTube rather than just ask them to cease and desist. This promotion could come in the way of YouTube "premier access" videos or site area, driven by g-checkout (or whatever its name is), where users pay for individual access to videos (at $.05 a view for a 2 minute video? maybe..) or perhaps for a site-wide access on a monthly fee basis. Or this promotion could come in the way of simply trying to pursuade copyright holders to let heir heavily compressed 320x240 webvideo stay up, with blatant text links/banners to the official site or whatever. As someone who actually creates commercial video content (I make documentaries, but have directed other projects such as music videos, etc), this is a situation I am amenable to. I'd be fine with google showing excepts of my last couple of films (extreme sports stuff), with context links on the page to buy the DVD, or maybe to "jamster" type ringtone sites that sell my video ringtones (which I don't actually have, but funny story, a large distributor [rhymes with Barner Wrothers] approached us to distribute our latest film, and one of their executive's biggest sales pitches to us [this was around a yr ago] was doing video ringtones-- "they're going to be huge!"). Also, remember, even if YouTube can't turn a profit on its own, the data-mining possibilities are endess... let's say I use my YouTube account (i am logged in via cookie) to watch lots of Morrissey videos. Then I google search for "documentary." There is [hypothetically] a new documentary coming out about Morrissey's legal battles with former Smiths bandmates, and now google can serve me context ad content based on the context of not just what I searched for, but what google also know me to enjoy. The correlations that can be made by cross referencing this content are pretty friggin extensive. I am positive this hasn't escaped their attention.
So in short, yes, everyone (including the big G) saw this coming. Expect some cool adaptations soon, I do hope.
Sidenote: I think that there is probably an amazing documentary to be made about the goings-on inside google.. what it means to work on the campus, how google employees are treated differently than typical IT employees, how they foster innovation, how they continue to push the envelope of how to do business on the web, their expansion into china (and grappling wi
Re:what copyright provides (Score:3, Insightful)
Copyright does not, never had, nor ever will, protect ideas. It protects the expression of ieas in a fixed medium. perdiod, full stop, end of story. Ideas cannot be locked up with copyrights, that would be the world of patents, two doors down on the left.
This is EXACTLY how copyright law works (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Cross-Pollination (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:That's unfortunate.... (Score:2, Insightful)
Maybe that's why they want them removed. Could it be a secret plot by the Japanese to export only anime, but keep all the really good live action Japanese cultural related shows to themselves? It could also be that the Japanese don't mind acting fools infront of other Japanese, but by damned if they'll act a fool where non-Japanese will see it.
Reasonable. (Score:3, Insightful)
But then my friend made a very good point. Youtube was sold for $1.6 billion in no small part because they attracted viewers with copyrighted programming. They certainly have made little effort in the past to block that kind of material.
That friend has been in a similar situation where someone running a site overseas goes and essentially takes his copyrighted flash games and puts them on their site without his permission. They then lure visitors using my friend's, and other people's, creations in order to make money on advertising.
Why Youtube was ever worth $1.6 billion is beyond me.
Re:Google is goin' down (Score:4, Insightful)
Arr.
Re:Licensing? (Score:2, Insightful)
The "licensed in the US" argument is irrelevant. These items infringe the copyrights of legitimate rights holders in another country that's also a member of WIPO. International treaties signed by the US have the force of law in the US.
Law's on their side. (Score:3, Insightful)
As long as they respond to takedown requests and have an address on file with the Copyright Office for those requests, then I think they're pretty safe in doing what they're doing.
Everybody here on Slashdot has been predicting the death of Google by way of YouTube lawsuits, but I think they've probably thought it through a little further than that. The law as it is today seems to be on their side. This doesn't mean that the copyright holders couldn't get enough pet senators together and "fix" that, but at least right now they're living up to their responsibilities.
Of course they could still get sued -- this is America, anyone can sue anyone for anything -- but I'm not sure that they'll necessarily lose. And they have enough money to keep a lawsuit going for a while, it's not the bankruptcy-inducing thing that it would be for a small company.
Re:Copyright holder != international megacorp (Score:4, Insightful)
The "small, specialist outfits" are precisely the ones who could benefit most from the huge, free exposure that a YouTube provides - they should be embracing this opportunity. Instead, however, they band together (as the JASRAC group in the TFA) and use the same jackboot tactics as their big corporate brethren.
The draconion copyright statutes instituted by the megacorps certainly aren't there to help the little guys - they're there to maintain the status quo. The small outfits should be clamoring for new advertising and distribution channels like YouTube and P2P, but they're not. In their silence they are complicit with the RIAA and MPAA thugs.
Re:Google is goin' down (Score:3, Insightful)
On one end you have people who thing everything should be free and anything is fair game.
And at the other extreme you have companies spending hundreds of millions, if not billions of dollars for something that's at its core immaterial.
A bigger problem, to me, is how intrusive internet advertising has become, and that's to say nothing about the general crap quality of that advertising. These sites sell for so much money not because they actually offer anything of real substance but simply because they've hit on enough of a hook that they've managed to lure millions of visitors. The more visitors the more people exposed to advertising.
The Internet is in a big way driven by ad supported models, much like television. These sites exist for advertising which means that whoever is running the site must be responsible for content.
Re:Noooooo!!! (Score:3, Insightful)
Admitedly, 2 of the most popular shows (atm) are Licensed and airing in the US, however Dattebayo is still subing them.
But what else do you expect from the GNAA?
Re:Non-dubbed anime. (Score:2, Insightful)
Are you also assuming that the professional subtitle scripts are 100% accurate to the original Japanese meaning?
Furthermore, are you assuming that those subbed anime files on YouTube were translated and subbed by professional translators?
Remember, with animation, the "original" voice track is also a dub track. Just as there are...less-than-talented American voice actors, so there are less-than-skillful Japanese voice actors. And, fandubs vary wildly in quality (anyone recall the AnimeJunkies' mass naked child events [imageshack.us] fiasco?)
Japanese production companies want their products to be seen in the best light possible -- right of publicity and all, y'know. An amateur translation/subtitling job probably won't be good enough for that.
Re:Noooooo!!! (Score:4, Insightful)
So... they were ok with it since they had no plans to sell the shows here
Of course. YouTube is the next Napster (Score:5, Insightful)
Of course this happened. YouTube is the next Napster. Same centralized hosting of uploaded content, same business model, same excuses, same legal problems. YouTube is in a worse legal position than Napster. Napster just hosted the index. YouTube hosts the actual content.
YouTube could well be shut down by an injunction. That's what happened to Napster. "Napster is enjoined from copying or assisting or enabling or contributing to the copy or duplication of all copyrighted songs and musical compositions of which the plaintiffs hold rights." -- U.S. District Judge Marilyn Hall Patel.
As for it being the responsibility of the copyright holder to find the material, "Napster wrote the software; it's up to them to write software that will remove from users the ability to copy copyrighted material," -- Judge Patel
YouTube, like Napster, is a contributory infringer. "The district court determined that plaintiffs had demonstrated they would likely succeed in establishing that Napster has a direct financial interest in the infringing activity. We agree. Financial benefit exists where the availability of infringing material "acts as a 'draw' for customers." -- 9th Circuit Court of Appeals.
I was amazed that Google bought YouTube. It was obvious they were buying into a huge litigation problem.
Says who? (Score:1, Insightful)
I happen to like anime music videos, thank you very much. I still have some old Otaku Vengeance videos from many years ago that I watch from time to time. Anime music videos are an innovative re-mixing of cultural media into something interesting.
If you don't like them, don't watch them. No need to shit all over the rest of us who DO like them.
Re:Noooooo!!! (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:That's unfortunate.... (Score:5, Insightful)
The one thing that the so-called intellectual property 'owners' don't understand is that the only thing worse than having someone view your video without paying is to have no one interested in viewing your video at all. And every step that they take to close off access to public viewing of their video products sends the public into other directions for interesting videos. Directions that are not under the control of the video or music industries and directions that are unable to generate profits for the video and music industries.
That is the whole point of the YouTube phenomenon. Young people are very interested in seeing videos that are outside of the control of the global media giants. And interested in not paying money for the experience. Any normal person could figure this out, but media executives and lawyers are not normal people. Their brains work differently.
In other words, the media industry needs to learn that removing your products from the new general media outlets seriously decreases long-term demand for your products. And a serious decrease in demand means for them a serious decrease in the advertising revenue stream.
One would think that they would have learned this lesson from the demise of network television over the past twenty years. But again, their brains just don't work like ordinary brains do.
The global media companies will be gone in twenty years, Good riddance!
American media corps don't want you watching YouT (Score:4, Insightful)
...ube at all. No doubt they had a hand in reporting the programs and surely will not stop there. They would like to see all foreign programs barred for whatever reason simply because an eyeball glued to YouTube is NOT an eyeball glued to the major networks. If they could ban the home videos on YouTube they'd like to see that done too.
They perhaps are beginning to realize that the drop in their revenue is not so much because of media piracy, but because there's just so darn much competition that's been enabled by the internet and they're getting beat up. And unfortunately, it's not like there's just one upstart that they can buy-out and assimilate, there's millions of individual, independent content sources out there that's diluting their monopoly. Boo-hoo about that, but watch out because they've got their claws out, and I expect there are some underhanded moves in store up ahead...
The youth market is no doubt severely affected-- the draw of internet media or video games is dragging the eyeballs away from the dinosaur networks in droves and they're pretty darn scared about it-- or if they aren't, they ought to be. They certainly deserve to be...