Google deletes anti-oil videos from YouTube

http://priceofoil.org/2013/08/28/youtube-sides-big-oil/

by chatman • 13 years ago

28 12 13 years ago

priceofoil.org

kevando• 13 years ago

The fact that the video has been taken down only makes more people want to watch it.

hnha• 13 years ago

blah blah blah. YouTube gives the channel owner a reason when videos are removed. What was the reason here?

fooqux• 13 years ago

Probably something completely rational, and thus not facilitative of attention-grabbing headlines.

sbarre• 13 years ago

Sigh.. while I actually support what Greenpeace did here, were the clips from the official broadcast (which makes it understandable that they got pulled) or was it someone's original footage (which would be less ok).

simias• 13 years ago

It does look like a massive bait, I can't imagine why google would have pulled these videos if it were not for licensing issues or similar. I don't buy the massive pro-oil conspiracy TFA hints at.

ZoF• 13 years ago

Haha, the fact that there was a second banner and they were put up in this manner makes this 100x better than a single one would have.

Here[1] is the link directly to the video/gp page

[1]http://www.greenpeace.org.uk/blog/climate/banned-video-our-s...

quaunaut• 13 years ago

As much as I'd love to see Shell and many other oil companies get a huge downsizing, this is some pretty onerous lying.

Google didn't "censor" anything, they complied with a DMCA request to take down the videos. It isn't because it's anti-oil, it's because it's copyrighted material.

There's a fair argument to be made about how idiotic the DMCA is, but shits the law in Google's world.

loup-vaillant2• 13 years ago

Still, it does points to a fundamental flaw of centralized services such as YouTube.

If people had symmetric bandwidth to begin with, had their own web site, and distributed their bigger files (such as videos) through a a peer-to-peer publication protocol (such as bit-torrent), then things such as DMCA would cause no problem.

Now, we would still need aggregators and search engines. But those only point the way, which is even harder to prevent.

anxiousest• 13 years ago

Distributed systems aren't immune to DMCA takedowns: http://www.chillingeffects.org

tzs• 13 years ago

I'm not so sure they have a copyright claim here.

The camera is shaky, leading me to believe this was filmed by someone in the audience working with Greenpeace, so to the extent that there is copyright in the cinematographic aspects of the video, the copyright would belong to Greenpeace or to the director (who was probably also the camera operator). (Which would depend on the relationship between those two).

That leaves the issue of copyright in what they were recording. The only element I see of that which has a good chance of being copyrighted is the music and the performance of the music. Neither of these seem likely to be Shell.

The ceremony itself could be considered a choreographic work, but I don't think (at least in the US) that it would qualify for copyright under the Feist v. Rural Telephone standard. In that case, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of an accused infringer who had literally copied the white pages of a phone book. The Court said that it is a Constitutional requirement that there be creativity in a work for it to be copyrightable, and that taking a list of customers and ordering them alphabetically is not creative enough. I'd expect that taking a line of winners and having them stand on a platform while music plays fails in a similar way to be sufficiently creative to support copyright.

daraul• 13 years ago

I was disappointed this wasn't a Newsmax link.

Google deletes anti-oil videos from YouTube

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