McCain: hoist on his own DMCA petard
p2pnet news view | P2P | Politics:- “YouTube has fallen victim to its own fear — the fear of being sued by media companies as large as itself — and the Republican presidential candidate has fallen victim to his own votes.”
So says E-Commerce Times, the ‘victim’ being, appropriately, John McCain.
He was a supoorter of the corporate entertainmment industry’s 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) and, “Earlier this week, the McCain campaign fired a letter at the Google-owned video sharing site, urging it to ‘commit to a full legal review of all takedown notices on videos posted from accounts controlled by… political candidates and campaigns’,” says The Register.
“By providing a platform for political candidates and the American public to post, view, share, discuss, comment on, mash-up, re-mix, and argue over campaign-related videos, YouTube has played a prominent and overwhelmingly positive role in the 2008 election,” says McCain’s letter unctuously.
“We write, however, to an alert you to a problem that has already chilled this free and uninhibited discourse, and propose a solution,” it says , going on:
“Numerous times during the course of the campaign, our advertisements or web videos have been the subject of DMCA takedown notices regarding uses that are clearly privileged under the fair use doctrine.”
But YouTube general counsel Zahavah Levine (right) isn’t having any, says The Register.
Like, fair is fair? Right?
Instead, she told McCain’s handlers, “We try to be careful not to favor one category of content on our site over others, and to treat all our users fairly, regardless of whether they are an individual, a large corporation, or a candidate for public office.”
And, “We hope that as a content uploader, you have gained a sense of some of the challenges we face everyday in operating YouTube,” she adds.
Nice one, Zahava. 
McCain might also want to take a look at her YouTube post on Copyright and Fair Use.
Aimed at John Q Citizen rather than John McCain, “There’s a lot of education [on fair use] that needs to be done,” it says.
“There is a lot of confusion …….
E-Commerce Times – DMCA Comes Back to Bite McCain, October 15, 2008
The Register – GooTube snubs McCain’s call for DMCA favoritism, October 15, 2008
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October 17th, 2008 at 5:32 am
I would have sent him a letter saying “Maybe next time, before you bend over for the media corporations, you’ll stop and think of the average person and how the laws you’re voting on will affect them.”