Tag Archive for: Down

CBS Gets Angry Joe’s YouTube Review Of ‘Picard’ Taken Down For Using 26 Seconds Of The Show’s Trailer

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Joe Vargas, who makes the fantastic The Angry Joe Show on YouTube, isn’t a complete stranger to Techdirt’s pages. You may recall that this angry reviewer of all things pop culture swore off doing reviews of Nintendo products a while back after Nintendo prevented Vargas from monetizing a review of a a game. The whole episode highlighted just how out of touch companies like Nintendo can be with this sort of thing, given how many younger folks rely on reviews like Vargas’ to determine where they spend their gaming dollars. Coupled with the argument that these commentary and review videos ought to constitute use of footage as fair use and it’s hard to see why any of this was worth it to Nintendo.

Or CBS, apparently. CBS recently got Angry Joe’s YouTube review of ‘Picard’ taken down, claiming copyright on the 2 thirteen-second videos of the show’s publicly available trailer that Vargas used in the review.

This is normally where some folks would suspect that ContentID or some automated system saw the images, resulting in an automated DMCA notice. Except that, as Vargas points out in his Twitter post, this was a manual block. Somebody at CBS saw Vargas’ use of the footage and manually requested that the video be taken down on copyright grounds.

And that’s crazy. First, the use of clips like this to discuss a review or critique of content is squarely within the grounds of fair use.

Based on the screenshot, it appears that Vargas was discussing the clips while they were on-screen and Vargas argues that this should constitute fair use – a provision in copyright law that allows copyrighted material to be used without permission from the copyright holder for transformative purposes such as commentary and criticism.

Add to that the clips were from the publicly available trailer footage and this makes even less sense. The trailers are out there for anyone to see. Hell, the entire point of trailers is to be widely disseminated to entice interest in the show. Blocking their use would seem to be at odds with the marketing goals of CBS.

And, yet, here we are, with CBS taking down a video for using trailer footage in a way that is clearly fair use. But some say YouTube doesn’t have a copyright enforcement problem? Please.

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Apple Filed A Silly, Questionable DMCA Notice On A Tweeted iPhone Encryption Key… Before Backing Down

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Copyright continues to serve its purpose as a tool for censorship, it seems. This week there was some hubbub over Apple’s highly questionable decision to send a DMCA takedown notice over a tweet by a security researcher who goes by “Siguza,” and who appeared to publish an iPhone encryption key on Twitter:

Twitter took it down upon receipt of the takedown notice, but later put it back after Apple rescinded the takedown — either realizing that the takedown was bogus or futile (or, I guess, both).

You can understand (sorta) why Apple would want to protect the key, but copyright seems like exactly the wrong tool for the job. Of course, that’s often the case, but copyright is such an easy tool to abuse to try to silence speech that it is often the preferred tool of would-be censors. This is just one example. But it does raise questions. Is an encryption key even copyright-eligible? That seems highly unlikely. Copyright only is supposed to apply to the creative elements of a work, and it would be difficult to argue that an encryption key meets the “creative” level necessary. US courts have already decided that phone numbers are not subject to copyright (even made up numbers), so it seems unlikely that an encryption key would pass muster for getting a copyright.

Potentially Apple could have been making a DMCA 1201 “anti-circumvention” argument as well — but even that seems silly, and only highlights the problems of the anti-circumvention provisions of Section 1201 of the DMCA. When a single tweet with a single code is seen as “circumvention” then there’s a big problem — and that problem is the law.

It’s good that Apple backed down on this, though it still highlights the problems of the DMCA takedown process, and how it can be used unfairly for censorship — even if that “censorship” completely backfired this time.

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Johannesburg’s network shut down after second attack in 3 months

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Johannesburg City Hall

Enlarge / Johannesburg City Hall (credit: Chris Eason)

Johannesburg, the biggest city in South Africa and the 26th largest city worldwide, has shut down its website, billing and electronic services after being hit by a serious network attack, the second one in three months, municipality officials said.

A group calling itself Shadow Kill Hackers took to Twitter to take credit for the attack, claiming it took Johannesburg’s “sensitive finance data offline.” The group is demanding 4 Bitcoins, valued at about $ 32,000 US, for the safe return of the data.

A Johannesburg spokesman said the city took down the site after it detected a breach and that so far no formal ransom demands had been made. He also played down the extent of the breach.

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