Google Offered Legal Help to YouTube Users

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”.

The well-known hacking collective Anonymous announced itself “at war” with the Islamic State following the attacks in Paris, expanding its “#OpISIS” online campaign. The continuation of operation was announced on 15 November via one of the major Anonymous twitter accounts, @GroupAnon.

The group has published a video (originally in French), where a figure wearing Anonymous’ iconic Guy Fawkes mask addressed the terror group and promised to hunt them down. In the meantime, a loosely related group of hackivists named BinarySec has also confirmed its online stance against Isis.

The industry watchers confirm that opposition to Isis is nothing new amongst hacktivist communities. For example, both BinarySec and Anonymous, more broadly, have been disrupting jihadi online communications for a while now. Their operation began early in 2015 as #OpCharlieHebdo, where Anonymous devoted themselves to rooting out the social media accounts of Isis supporters.

The hackers declared a partial victory in #OpISIS already in February, after they managed to seize control of about 100 Twitter accounts associated with the group. Since February, Anonymous have made use of various tools to hinder Isis on the Internet. They seized social media accounts by guessing passwords or abusing reset emails or flagged them to either Twitter or Facebook to be shut down.

Besides, the hacking group has been using such tools as DDoS attacks, which are designed to overwhelm a destination website with traffic, in order to bring down public Islamic State sites. According to statistics, the hackers have had success, bringing down almost 150 websites, flagging over 100,000 Twitter accounts and reporting about 5,000 propaganda videos.

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