Ten minutes after NASA posted a video of the Curiosity landing on Mars to its official YouTube channel, the video was taken down again, replaced with a message saying it had been removed due to a copyright claim by Scripps Local News. It’s not clear whether Scripps actually filed a takedown notice with YouTube or whether YouTube’s “content-match” system was triggered automatically because Scripps registered a clip of its own news footage, incorporating the NASA footage, with YouTube.
Either way, it points out the enormous asymmetry in copyright today, a shoot first, ask questions later presumption of guilt that results in the evidence of billions of dollars of uplifting, tax-funded spectacle being removed from public view because of the grasping and depraved indifference of industries that are programmed to deny the idea that copying can be controlled.
Alex_Pasternack writes on Mother Board:
On Monday afternoon, a spokesperson for E.W. Scripps Company, owner of the news service, emailed Motherboard a statement apologizing for the accidental takedown. “We apologize for the temporary inconvenience experienced when trying to upload and view a NASA clip early Monday morning,” wrote Michele Roberts. “We made a mistake. We reacted as quickly as possible to make the video viewable again, and we’ve adjusted our workflow processes to remedy the situation in future.”
This isn’t the first time that a claim by the company, Scripps News Service, has grounded a NASA YouTube video: it happened in April, with a video of one of NASA’s Space Shuttles being flown atop a 747. According to Bob Jacobs, NASA’s Deputy Associate Administrator for Communications, such blocks happen once a month, and tend to be more common with popular videos.
“Everything from imagery to music gets flagged,” Jacobs told me this morning. “We’ve been working with You Tube in an effort to stop the automatic disabling of videos. So far, it hasn’t helped much.
“The good thing about automation is that you don’t have to involve real people to make decisions. The bad thing about automation is that you don’t have to involve real people to make decisions.”
NASA’s Mars Rover Crashed Into a DMCA Takedown
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