• Disney retracts copyright claim on a YouTuber’s “Steamboat Willie” video, allowing it to be monetizable and shareable worldwide.
• The claim had previously demonetized the video and restricted its visibility and embedding options.
• This move by Disney may signal its recognition of “Steamboat Willie” being in the public domain.
I completely agree, but isn’t this the issue with private platforms taking over essential functions of society? If YouTube wants to play ball with the copyright lobby that’s their business. They could ban any video for any reason whatsoever, it’s their platform.
Youtubes copyright system isn’t really the ‘problem’, the copyright laws are. Youtube gets yelled at by both sides at the same time and generally takes a reasonable middle man position. It’s not youtubes job to arbitrate who owns what.
And they’re pretty much required to take things down, it prevents them from being liable. After that, the uploader can challenge this decision, and if the claimer doesn’t back down, it goes to court.
Unfortunately, claimers are currently not required to provide any proof, nor are they required to pay for any legal costs (at least not upfront), so it’s just simpler for the uploader to take the L.
This is the key issue; the DMCA provides basically no penalty for making false claims. The natural choice is to claim everything and see who fights you.
Yep, agreed, that’s the worst thing about it. Makes sense more or less otherwise.
We should start a brigade to issue DMCA takedowns for every Disney video on YouTube.
They’re only required to take stuff down in response to DMCA claims.
They have absolutely no obligation for their alternate process to treat claims as valid until proven false.
You’re right, copyright laws were written ages ago when mass media was exclusively owned by big media companies. If there was ever a copyright dispute, the company’s lawyers would meet up with the other company’s lawyers and either settle or go to court, and both parties could easily pay for the legal fees because they were, you know, big media companies.
But nowadays everyone can simply upload something that can potentially reach billions of people, which is unprecedented in human (or legal) history, and the legal system simply hasn’t caught up to this radical shift in the status quo. This is why Youtube has to compromise between the big media conglomerates with expensive lawyers and, well, the rest of us.