Thursday, February 08, 2007

Viacom vs. YouTube fallout

About 20 of my favorite music videos are no longer available on YouTube. I get an error message like this:

the waitresses: i know what boys like [video unavailable]

I haven't done any research but I doubt if Viacom has a copyright on that or many of the other songs that have been deleted. The Big Chill is on.

While it lasts enjoy some Clash.


5 comments:

Anonymous said...

I thought copyrights expired after a certain time.

Anonymous said...

If these were videos you uploaded to Youtube yourself, and you have a good reason to think that Viacom has no claims on them, you may want to check out
http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/archives/005109.php
as EFF is looking for such cases.

If you didn't upload them yourself, you may want to pass this message on to whoever did.

D.B. Echo said...

Anonymous 1, Google "Mickey Mouse" and "copyright". The copyright on Mickey Mouse was set to expire a few years ago. It hasn't. Thanks to the Walt Disney corporation, the Supreme Court has decided that the finite lifespan of copyrights is much, much longer than any reasonable person would expect.

Viacom wouldn't do anything this dumb without something up their sleeves. I expect they'll be rolling out a website soon where, for a fee, you can view Viacom-copyrighted videos in higher-quality, non-downloadable form.

Anonymous said...

just a test; could not log on before with commentary.

Jacq said...

Sweet video...