Google is helping to defend YouTube users who find themselves on the wrong side of a copyright claim, following a series of skirmishes with established media and others.
This was done after privacy group Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) successfully defended a woman whose video of her son dancing to Prince’s Let’s Go Crazy had been removed from YouTube due to “copyright infringement”: the music label issued a DMCA notice ordering to take it down.
Google announced that with approval of the video creators, the company would keep such videos live on YouTube in the United States and feature them in the YouTube Copyright Center as examples of fair use. The company promised to cover the cost of any copyright lawsuits brought against them. Of course, Google won’t cover the court costs of every user on its streaming service, but the aim of the company is to demystify the process by which users could wield the law as effectively as representatives of the entertainment industry. Google has compiled a playlist of videos about which it has received complaints that it says it is going to defend in court.
Since tech firms rely on user-generated content and don’t want to deal with a potential flood of costly lawsuits from corporate rights holders, abuse of the DMCA is rampant and often used as a tool for political reprisal. The EFF can provide examples of creative uses of the takedown process – from a restaurant seeking to corner the market on a particular dessert recipe (by demanding to take down every recipe) to the Church of Scientology.
On the other hand, the industry observers say that tech firms were generally “evasive and unconcerned about even the most fundamental rights of Internet users”.
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