How Google Abuses DMCA, NOT Universal Music: Sorry EFF & ‘Mom’
Leave it to the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) to expolit a “poor, innocent” baby in the name of its crusade to foster $160 billion market cap Google’s no need to pay for the content of others YouTube business model.
The EFF, of course, recruited a willing “mom” as its accomplice. EFF’s ineffectual attempt at big bad Universal Music outrage is cloyingly headlined “Home video of dancing toddler yanked from YouTube,” with the people-friendly, yet ominous “Mom sues Universal Music for DMCA abuse.”
The aggrieved YouTuber “mom” on the ”abusive” Universal Music transgression against home and hearth:
I was really surprised and angry when I learned my video was removed. Universal should not be using legal threats to prevent people from sharing home videos of their kids with family and friends.
The “case” recalls the similarily outraged John Palfrey and Jim Moore, Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School, who sought to rally support for a prospective class action lawsuit against Viacom, because YouTube removed Moore’s friends and family footage back in February.
I underscored at the time that the Palfrey and Moore indignation was misdirected, positing Google as the DMCA abuser for choosing to recklessly operate a multi-billion dollar video entertainment destination as a “fair use” playground.
HOW SO? If Google’s YouTube proactively screened for copyright infringing videos, as News Corp. does at its MySpace, there would be no need for DMCA takedown notices.
Regarding the video of ”bouncing baby” dancing to a Prince song YouTube case at hand, Universal Music is in its rights to demand DMCA takedown.
WHY? Because, contrary to the assertions of “mom” and the EFF, the artistic work of the little bundle of joy is not a “home video,” shared at home that is.
Google proudly declares its YouTube to be the “leader in online video” and the “premier destination” for watching videos. Accordingly, Google sells advertiser access to the massive entertainment seeking audience it attracts to YouTube.
Therefore, while “mom’’s video may be of friends and family quality, and interest, it is being packaged and sold by Google’s YouTube as part and parcel of its unique online video entertainment destination value proposition to decidely not friends and family corporate marketers.
Universal Music must be compensated for YouTube’s commercial exploitation of any video that it hosts in which Universal Music copyright material is “center stage,” even if a baby tries to steal the show.
READ my exclsuive interview with the lead prosecuting attorneys, Proskaeur Rose, in the class action against YouTube for “massive copyright infringement”: YouTube Copyright Infringement Claims ‘tip of the iceberg’
ALSO: How Pegasus News Fuels Local Media Business Model for Fisher Communications: INTERVIEW and Digg Collector’s Item: Google Ads!