All Your F1 Video are Belong to Us
As Christine pointed out already, yesterday was a bad day in the Sidepodcast office. In part because due to what can only be described as “some confusion” from the people at YouTube, we were served with a copyright infringement notice.
That kind of thing is never going to set your day off well, especially when it turns out to be completely false. Or at least we think it has, YouTube appear to have taken a vow of silence over the whole affair.
Just an Ordinary Day
The morning started pleasantly with some non-taxing file uploads planned for the latest video of Inside Track, when just after 11am, the following email arrived:
It was a copyright claim notice from YouTube’s content identification team, and the important bits read (emphasis mine):
Motors TV has claimed some or all visual content in your video F1 Barcelona Race Preview 2008.
As long as Motors TV has a claim on your video, they will receive public statistics about your video, such as number of views. Viewers may also see advertising on your video’s page.
That’s pretty much all we had to go on. No further details were given as to which part of the video was the issue, nor if this was an automated or manual process. Neither did it tell us much about Motors TV, other than they’d probably be making some money out of this.
As a Matter of Principle
At Sidepodcast we’ve always been pretty careful to make sure we recognise content owners whenever possible. Be it photographs, audio or video content, and you’ll often see a hefty list of credits at the end of our podcasts. We’ve never had any problem with previous shows, and this week’s wasn’t hugely different from the rest.
As a matter of course, YouTube do offer a ‘disputes’ process should we feel in the mood to disagree with such claims, but without knowing exactly which part of the video was the subject of the claim, defending yourself is quite difficult.
Long story short is we spent a great deal of time contacting all the relevant people and checking / rechecking to ensure we weren’t in the wrong before submitting our complaint.
Thus far we’ve heard nothing back.
Nobody’s Talking
Interestingly a copyright claim warning notice that had appeared on our account this morning, has now vanished, so presumably we’re in the clear. But who knows for sure?
We’ve no idea what the problem was, nor can we be certain that it won’t happen again. Couldn’t YouTube have at least contacted us to acknowledge receipt of the dispute and / or to confirm that all is now well?
We’ve wasted a good many hours and are absolutely none the wiser. Ontop of this, we may now have to rethink our approach to content distribution, because after spending 20 - 30 hours working hard to put a show together, it’s sure not nice being called a thief at the end of it.
Innocent until proven guilty? That’s not the YouTube way.
April 25th, 2008 at 1:40 ambrendan stallard said:
Me/Christine,
Bummer: if twere me, I’d be thinking hard about me YouTube uploads. Are they really worth it for your “customers”, or is it just necessary for your model to get it up on that place.
30 hours is a lot of worry and work, sure would make me less keen to be fiddling with stuff: especially the nasty little threat that viewers might see “advertising” from some outfit that merely claimed to have something to do with your original work.
At times, nothing but a Heckler and Koch will do to sort things out:) Vorsprung Durch Teknik!
brendan
April 25th, 2008 at 2:13 amJourneyer said:
I’m a fan of the YouTube uploads, mostly because they’re low-res and easier to download than the actual vids. Pretty shocking, this situation. I guess you’ve tried contacting Motors TV. Anyway, just make sure your video snippets are all free of copyright (and you have proof that it is!)
April 25th, 2008 at 7:36 amJust a reader said:
“Innocent until proven guilty? That’s not the YouTube way.”
No, that’s the Google way (they own YouTube). Also, warning or even punishing someone without giving details about what’s wrong is the Google way, too. Be prepared for it. (Especially because you also have Google ads on your site and probably want to rank high in their search engine. With all that stuff, their attitude is exactly the same, see eg. http://www.jayweintraub.com/2008/03/guilty-until-pr.html)
[No problem if you delete this comment, it's just to help you, not to bore your readers]
April 25th, 2008 at 7:47 amMichael Roberts said:
Didn’t realise Motors TV was such a hostile company. I’ve been watching DTM on their channel for the last few years, maybe I should start a boycott….
April 25th, 2008 at 7:48 amdaniel said:
yepp, the google way. don’t be evil…
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don’t_be_evil
very interesting read though, especially about the no answer and scilence from youtube. guess they just try to scare people?
April 25th, 2008 at 8:20 amme said:
didn’t appreciate that, interesting stuff.
i don’t know if they are though? this could just be an automated process that’s screwed up. at the moment i blame googletube.
this process appears to be designed for the kind of people that upload entire episodes of topgear, people who don’t create anything new. but our account has been active for over twelve months and we’ve never even looked like we might do that.
April 25th, 2008 at 8:50 amChristine said:
I always find the silence the most frustrating part. Lack of communication does nothing but harbour bad feelings. It’s happened a few times in the history of Sidepodcast, and mostly, I just say, forget it then. We’ll move on to something else.
But GoogleTube is so inherent in our video distribution, what are you gonna do? It’s all very well having principles but not if it’s shooting ourselves and our viewers in the foot.
April 25th, 2008 at 8:57 amme said:
tis also a very good point.
April 25th, 2008 at 10:16 amNONSENSE said:
Weird, motors tv never had much to offer, I watch DTM on ZDF das erste German channel for free via satellite dish (hotbird or astra) and they provide a much better coverage of the events and I dunno if that guy who used to comment in 2005 - Kirby or Carlton or Carl Toe N Kurby - on motors tv is still there but he was totally unaware of what was going on. He’d scream all thru the race and use phrases like “bang!”, “oh my godness”, “abt went mad” and just confusing the drivers and their nationalities, I think Peter Dumbreck was correcting him all the time. So, rather incompetent claim from YouTooth and anti-Motors Tv. They should mind their own business. I use other people’s stuff illegally all the time and nobody ever claimed anything against me. That’s unfair.
April 25th, 2008 at 11:23 amme said:
haha! ummm, no comment
April 26th, 2008 at 8:25 amAlex Andronov said:
Really sorry to hear about all of this.
I believe that certain people / firms have been serving YouTube takedown notices for a while. And as part of this process they are allowed to submit video to Google as evidence. This is then processed by Google and matched to videos on YouTube.
I think it started in response to the Viacom law suit and has been extended to other areas each time somebody threatens to sue. Some people like the BBC haven’t been particularly bothered it seems. But Bernie uploads all of the races and generally people are automatically caught.
My guess is Motors TV are in that program. They used a clip from an interview done by one of the teams in one of their programs and when it was processed there was a match.
So who’s fault is it? Sounds to me it was Motors TV for not taking that part out of their show. If they don’t own the copyright they shouldn’t be submitting it as that. They should edit out those parts before submitting it to Google.
N.B. This is why my youtube video of Max the other day had no tags and it’s very own YouTube account (it was a Viacom show - the daily show). I think they search videos with matching tags - I’m not sure.
April 26th, 2008 at 9:12 amme said:
sounds very likely alex.
i wouldn’t be surprised if the tube had frame by frame matching software (that compared he shapes or colours in the video), and motors tv submitted the 3d track animation.
what i’d like to know is why doesn’t motors tv have to prove they own this stuff and what happens now youtube know they’re claiming for content that isn’t theirs?
April 26th, 2008 at 6:31 pmAlianora La Canta said:
If I remember my advanced search classes correctly, that’s exactly how YouTube does its copyright matching. American law obliges it to act immediately on any DCMA (Digital Copyright Milllenium Act) complaints and I would guess that YouTube dropped the claim when they decided Motors TV didn’t have enough evidence to complete the DCMA claim. The proof stage of DCMA comes after the initial complaint, but thankfully before YouTube is allowed to declare anyone guilty. Perhaps someone submitted a conflicting copyright claim or someone at YouTube decided that the precise copyright type in use by the copyright owner allowed the use to which Sidepodcast used the piece. Unfortunately their poor customer service means we’ll never know.
Still, it sounds like you had a really rough day on Thursday.
Hope you don’t get any more silly claims like this.
April 26th, 2008 at 10:52 pmIan (Growler) said:
Counter-sue the idiots for loss of viewers, or liable, or slander…….or something
May 17th, 2008 at 1:02 amOf Age and Gender | Sidepodcast : Your Weekly F1 Podcast said:
[...] announced an update to their stats pages yesterday, and although I’m still quite mad at them, statistics are something I can never [...]
May 28th, 2008 at 12:35 pmme said:
hey, guess what? youtube / motors tv have misidentified our content again.
we are therefore no longer uploading any more sidepodcast videos to the site. here’s my email to youtube:
we’ll keep uploading shows to dailymotion as they seem able to deal with this properly (and respond to email):
http://www.dailymotion.com/sidepodcast
May 28th, 2008 at 12:56 pmlou said:
Oh no! thats awful!
im so sorry they are causing you problems and stress. its not fair.
have never used dailymotion. Will you be posting any sidepodcast diaries (if your doing more) on dailymotion?
May 28th, 2008 at 12:58 pmDom said:
Seems like the right thing to do if they’re causing you problems. Does this mean no more SP diaries?
May 28th, 2008 at 1:04 pmme said:
up to christine, i guess she could move them all onto another site. we’ll have a think.
not that she’s done any in ages of course
May 28th, 2008 at 1:09 pmChristine said:
Could be the kind of thing where drop.io comes into it’s own
SP Diaries isn’t dead, by the way, but I was in the middle of giving it a bit of a makeover and then the season started. Always the way, isn’t it?
And now I have a mac, so it’s all different.
Will join “me” in having a think, and see what we can come up with.
May 28th, 2008 at 1:17 pmlou said:
You could always just post them on here
or on drop.io/formula 1 
they are not like the regular podcasts/videos, so they would not take up lots and lots of your space. Just a few ideas. not sure they will help.
May 28th, 2008 at 1:59 pmme said:
i think it’s about time we did that.
May 28th, 2008 at 2:05 pmlou said:
How are you going with the mac? was it easy to switch to?
May 28th, 2008 at 3:12 pmChristine said:
It wasn’t easy in the sense that I’m programmed to use a PC, and I like my PC so I wasn’t as open to the Mac as I should have been. It was easy in the sense that very little about the Mac is difficult.
I’m getting there, step by step, a little bit more Mac-centric every day. And whenever I transfer a job over to the Mac from the PC, like checking emails, or installing a feed reader, “me” sings a little song of both happiness and I told you so.
May 28th, 2008 at 3:18 pmlou said:
awwww. I had a go on a mac yesterday, i found it so hard to get used to and navigate around. I thought of you getting used to your mac and realised how tricky it must have been at first. I mean, it took me 5 mins to figure out how to close a window.
May 28th, 2008 at 3:33 pmLynch said:
Count yourself lucky you are going from PC -> Mac and not the other way around… after being PC free for 4 years now you should see the confusion I get into when I am confronted with Windoze…. at least OSX is easy to navigate….
May 28th, 2008 at 4:20 pmRich said:
I made the migration from Windows to Mac a few months ago - there was some frustration, mostly to find free programs that I was used to on Windows in the Mac environment. We still have to use Windows for some things, so they are all dual boot. iMacs running under Windows are the best Windows work stations around. In a few months use you will not want to look at Windows PC, I can promise you that - Macs rule the desktop.