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February 22, 2006
Lightnet is a new fault line in digital politics
Lucas Gonze picked up on my argument with Xeni Jardin regarding YouTube and the SNL Lazy Sunday fiasco. His deconstruction of the issue is pretty interesting:
Both Josh and Xeni are part of the bleeding edge, and not long ago it would have been very surprising to see such a stark difference in their views. What this exchange shows is that lightnet is a new fault line in digital politics. Is the work at hand about samizdat, as Xeni thinks, or about participatory media, as Josh thinks?
I confess, I had to look up samizdat on Wikipedia:
Samizdat (Russian: самиздат) was the clandestine copying and distribution of government-suppressed literature or other media in Soviet-bloc countries. The idea was that copies were made a few at a time, and anyone who had a copy would make more copies, often by handwriting or typing, because copy machines were guarded by what Mikhail Bulgakov called "the secret service" (see KGB, Soviet censorship).
This made me think of Kenyatta's post about Lightnet v. Darknet a few months back where he describes the role Darknets play in disseminating suppressed information in opressive circumstances. This is true samizdat and I agree that an underground economy can help empower the oppressed and lead to important social outcomes.... for instance, distribution of the photos from Abu Gharib could circulate through P2P networks and other Darknets in a way that protects the identities of the distributors and disseminates the information effectively.
However, redistribution of pirated Saturday Night Live videos is hardly a cause worth fighting for, and that seems to be what YouTube has really attached its star to.
Its really unfortunate when such a high-profile (read, high traffic) site like YouTube serves as a bad example. It reflects poorly on everyone working hard to enable a true participatory media culture. I think Lucas hit it on the head by saying Lightnet is the fault line here, and I think its something truly worth fighting for.
Posted by jkinberg at 7:34 PM | Comments (2)
February 20, 2006
Update on YouTube and NBC scuffle
From the NYTimes:
Julie Supan, senior director of marketing for YouTube, said she contacted NBC Universal about working out a deal to feature NBC clips, including "Lazy Sunday," on the site. NBC Universal responded early this month with a notice asking YouTube to remove about 500 clips of NBC material from its site or face legal action under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.Since when does a failure to respond equate to permission granted?
There are three little words that apply to any form of expression, whether you agree with it or not... those words are "all rights reserved." If there is nothing saying "permission granted" then by default it is "all rights reserved." These three words are important to any content creator, whether they happen to be NBC Universal or my cousin filming her cat.
YouTube in fact recognized that the video was plaigarized and contacted NBC to "work out a deal," meanwhile YouTube continued to host and redistribute the video after a lack of response from NBC. I guess YouTube assumed that meant they had permission? They have lawyers, right? I mean, they are a VC funded company.
Posted by jkinberg at 8:45 PM | Comments (0)
February 19, 2006
NBC sends YouTube Take-Down Notice for SNL Lazy Sunday
This video is illegal.
YouTube received a take-down notice from NBC regarding the SNL Lazy Sunday video. That was sure a long time coming. Here's what YouTube says on their blog:
NBC recently contacted YouTube and asked us to remove Saturday Night Live's "Lazy Sunday: Chronicles of Narnia" video. We know how popular that video is but YouTube respects the rights of copyright holders. You can still watch SNL's "Lazy Sunday" video for free on NBC's website.
This response from YouTube must be firmly tongue-in-cheek. They "respect the rights of copyright holders"?! Give me a break. There's tons of infringing content all over YouTube. There's no way they could possibly plead ignorance here (they even hired the brother of one of the SNL sketch writers to be their "director of community" soon after they struck gold with this clip)... its clear that the video was infringing from the moment it was posted onto the site. Its an entire clip from SNL, not an excerpt, and certainly not fair use. Its got an NBC watermark on it.
At what point was YouTube given permission to re-broadcast this video to millions of viewers through their website? Its not like this was file sharing amongst a few friends, this was re-broadcasted on a video portal site to millions of viewers. This is like CBS recording Saturday Night Live and then airing it the next day... and everyday after that for weeks. YouTube quite obviously benefits from video plaigarism of this sort all the time... but then again they're not alone.
This clip was all over the internet. It was also on CollegeHumor.com, and yanked from there by Google Video (obvious from the CollegeHumor watermark, so its a copy of a copy on Google). It was probably on several other video hosting sites and portals (there's a lot of them out there now), as well as on several personal websites.
NBC later released the clip as a free download on iTunes (its now $1.99), and they offer it for free viewing on their website (only for PC users with Internet Explorer).
Of course, some people think that YouTube should be congratulated for their copyright infringing practices. Here's what Xeni Jardin says about it on BoingBoing:
This isn't like another television network broadcasting the skit without permission. YouTube is a service through which individual fans can share stuff they're nuts about with others. NBC issuing a C&D to YouTube makes about as much sense as NBC sending attorneys to the homes of every blogger or Livejournaler user who posted a link to a torrent somewhere
Sorry, Xeni, that's completely wrong. In the same blog entry where YouTube responds to the take-down notice they also say:
YouTube is now serving up more than 15 million videos streamed per day- that's nearly 465M videos streamed per month
So how exactly are they different from a TV network? How are they exempt from the laws and standard practices of the industry?
Posted by jkinberg at 12:36 AM | Comments (8)
February 3, 2006
Get Your Video Popups Here!
Update: Pete has added these files to EmbedTheVideo.com. Please go there and Embed The Video!
-- Feb. 5, 2006
I made this video popup maker thingie a while back.
It was going to be part of the Vlogging Hacks book that Jay, Ryanne, Michael, and I were writing for O'Reilly. Sadly, the book got cancelled and I pushed the project to the back burner. I never wrote about it here on this blog, but I did write about it on Unmediated. The reasons for using this approach are very practical. It preserves the direct link in the blog entry for services like FeedBurner, while also providing an embedded video experience that works in any browser.... including Internet Explorer.
I find myself writing a ton of similar emails to the Videoblogging List about this... whenever some issue comes up about embedded Quicktime, or Quicktime not working in IE (don't believe the rumors), I fire off a similar email that has now been enshrined by Pete on a newly christened domain, EmbedTheVideo.com. (Note to self: maybe I should actually keep a draft and copy-paste the text each time).
Some people have asked for the PHP code used in the popup window. Here it is:
Download popup.txt (rename it from .txt to .php)
You can simply copy and edit the page for the popup code generator since its all javascript/html. Simply "View Source" and copy the code to a new document:
http://joshkinberg.com/popupmaker
It should work for any Quicktime or Windows Media videos... I never got around to adding support for Flash SWF, FLV, or RealPlayer, but it should be really easy to do. I just never took the time to do it. Ah, the lonely back burner.
Enjoy!
Posted by jkinberg at 5:21 PM | Comments (11)