The ‘takedowns’ chill factor
p2pnet news | movies:- Nonprofessional, online video now accounts for a sizeable portion of all broadband traffic, with much of the work using copyrighted material.
But, “The healthy growth of this new mode of expression is at risk of becoming a casualty of the efforts of copyright owners to limit wholesale redistribution of their content on sites like YouTube, and of videomakers’ own uncertainties about the law,” says the American University’s center for social media.
“Political and cultural commentaries are endangered by ‘takedowns’ (Internet service providers’ taking down of videos upon demand) that sometimes are examples of hyper-vigilance and sometimes are simply in error,” says the University, citing the National Football League to demand the takedown of 33 seconds of a football game, 13 seconds of which were a copyright announcement.
“Viacom even demanded a takedown of a parody of Stephen Colbert’s parody of right-wing punditry (’Stop the Falsiness‘), until the Electronic Frontier Foundation objected,” says university.
“Indeed, copyright holders often back off, once someone objects; but many people don’t even know they can.”
With this in mind, it’s launching Copyright and Fair Use in Participatory Media to promote standards for the use of copyrighted materials in user-generated media that is broadcast online.
The project builds on the two organizations’ success in helping to establish ‘best practices’ for fair use by documentary filmmakers, it says going on:
These occasional problems with freedom of expression, generated by copyright confusion, once internalized become self-censorship. This is already happening.
Students interviewed for a Center for Social Media study, The Good, the Bad, and the Confusing, often decided not to make or release work, for fear of copyright laws that they didn’t understand.
Industry efforts to address this issue, such as the negotiations around the Viacom v. Google lawsuit, have not taken into consideration users or the potential of the emerging culture of participatory (or user-generated) video production. And yet there are useful approaches that can include users, extend best practices, and encourage problem-solving as new cultural habits develop. These approaches depend on the balancing features of copyright law, most importantly the ‘fair use’ doctrine.
Phase one of the project consists of a study of how makers of online video currently use copyrighted materials and will be headed by CSM Research Fellow Neil Sieling, a media arts curator, television producer, and media systems architect.
Examples of today’s practices are showcased in the short video Remix Culture: The Early Years.
Phase two includes collaborative work with online video providers to provide best-practices information on copyright 
and fair use on their sites. Revver.com provides an excellent example in showcasing the Documentary Filmmakers’ Statement of Best Practices in Fair Use on its copyright page.
In the final phase of the project, CSM and PIJIP will convene a stakeholder meeting on developing best-practices for user-generated content and participatory media, building on the groundbreaking convening, Unauthorized.(Thanks, Ray)
Click on the microphone on the right to hear this story. If you’d like to do a p2pnetcast, just pick a post that hasn’t been done and send the results to p2pnet @ shaw dot ca. You have an accent? No problem 
Also See:
Center for social media- Hospital’s tokens of thanks turn up for sale online, August 1, 2007
Stop the Falsiness – EFF ‘Colbert Report’ parody case, March 22, 2007
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August 6th, 2007 at 11:12 am
This is a great article. Jon really gets it, about how important it is to our future that fair use be predictable. The future of user-generated creativity on the internet depends on it.
August 6th, 2007 at 1:47 pm
Great article. This is just the begining of the next wave of social media. As more and more people come forward, citizen journalism is bound to grow by leaps and bounds.