YouTube may deny Fair Use to Alex Jones using Content ID as weapon

Author: Brian D. Hill

YouTube’s Content ID has flagged Alex Jone’s review of Warner Brothers movie The Dark Knight Rises for using bits and pieces of the promotional ad video before the movie hit the theaters today.

Infowars stated this on their website: “The video had been released for over a month and had amassed nearly 300,000 views before it was blocked, whereas normally videos flagged for copyright matches are flagged by You Tube’s automated bot system within minutes or hours. Instead, the facts indicate that the video has been blocked manually for political purposes just prior to the film’s release July 20th. On previous occasions, “content ID” blocks or flags, as they’re known in the You Tube system, happen almost immediately, but this did not fit that pattern.”

This is what has happened to his video yesterday.

Ever since the creation of Content ID many videos everywhere on YouTube are being penalized which would be found under a federal court to be within the guidelines of Fair Use exemptions under Copyright law which gives limited protection of exclusive copyright holders. What would be under Fair Use depends on several factors such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research, which is not an infringement of copyright law. Canada has Fair Dealing and other countries may have similar exemption laws. Also copyrighted material such as newspaper material and political photos(with credit of the original photographer) may be used in Independent reports given to town, city, state, and federal governments including court records. Videos being penalized include using portions of George Carlins political comedy videos, using portions of Hollywood movies for political videos, using portions of anime series and movies for political videos, and even using a portion of some news videos can be flagged for copyright infringement. The difference between DMCA and Content ID is that with the DMCA filing a fraudulent takedown request or takedown request against a website operator over content protected under Fair Use usually has penalties that can hurt the copyright holder and even fake DMCA complaint filers. Under YouTube’s Content ID people can take down material using fraudulent information and can even shut down political material with just the touch of a button, anything can be taken down without any legal consequences for abuse of it’s system. Anything can now be taken down under Content ID even other peoples own material. Content ID is like a bloodhound that can track traces of audio, video, and photo frames and when it finds matches it can block those videos and put strikes on the account holders. Due to the widespread abuse of Content ID only DMCA requests get a strike on YouTube accounts but now Content ID is starting to be used to penalize accounts and put them under a 15 minute limit. The only way to reverse those penalties is by going to court over every flagged video spending hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal fees.

Section 107 under Title XVII of the Copyright Act deals directly with “Fair Use”:

§ 107 . Limitations on exclusive rights: Fair useNotwithstanding the provisions of sections 106 and 106A, the fair use of a copyrighted work, including such use by reproduction in copies or phonorecords or by any other means specified by that section, for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research, is not an infringement of copyright. In determining whether the use made of a work in any particular case is a fair use the factors to be considered shall include—

(1) the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes;
(2) the nature of the copyrighted work;
(3) the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and
(4) the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.

The fact that a work is unpublished shall not itself bar a finding of fair use if such finding is made upon consideration of all the above factors.

Now even using the infamous John F. Kennedy secret society speech audio in videos are being flagged under Content ID so that means copyright holders are even targeting those that use historical political speeches even from a former president that was assassinated by the very secret societies he spoke against.

USWGO’s YouTube account has been penalized several times and for the first time now has a DMCA takedown strike due to the Content ID system not recognizing what is under Fair Use protections. USWGO made a legal threat towards Twentieth Century Fox that if their Fair Use rights is not protected they would countersue them. For being kinda harsh to the very people holding USWGO’s fate, they instantly punished USWGO with a strike and forced Copyright School.

So Alex Jones has decided to take the same risky measure of either begging Warner Brothers to allow Fair Usage of their material for reviewing their movie or use legal threats but has the consequence of being given a strike and forced to attend a online Anti-Piracy school. It is not know what Alex Jones said to Warner Brothers in their Content ID dispute but don’t follow USWGO’s example for the Star Wars Anti-NWO ad video as sending legal threats just made Twentieth Century Fox angrier.

Fair Use is dying on YouTube and Content ID is being used for it.

Content ID is a automated system that checks each uploaded video and even older uploaded videos periodically for any material that is flagged as copyright material without a regard to check for how much of the material was used and whether it would be Fair Use under copyright law.

Buzz this!

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