After five years, "dancing baby" YouTube takedown lawsuit nears a climax | Hacker News Reader

After five years, "dancing baby" YouTube takedown lawsuit nears a climax

arstechnica.com

22 points001sky8 comments

The article summary of Universal Music's defense seems to say that since Universal had no procedures in place to determine if something was fair use, they can't be liable for the portion of the DMCA that punishes take-down attempts that are, in fact, fair use. Kafka-esque barely begins to describe this situation. I imagine that the defense will also introduce pictures of Universal compliance officers with their fingers in their ears as well.

We cannot be held liable for abuses we committed, because we didn't spend the effort to think before we acted.

That about wraps it up...

If this in fact is how it plays out in court, it would says alot about how USA laws are made (and form whom). Not a pretty picture for the great democracy. Public servants => providing carte-blanche to abuse the public interest.

http://xkcd.com/343/ Panel 2 specifically. Fighting in a broken system does nothing.

Copyright has taken too much from society to benefit IP holders. Corporations have the power to erase context from your life. It reminds me of Soviets erasing people from history.

Universal doesn't approve of your dancing baby? Sorry, but that event is no longer something you can freely distribute.

Worse yet, it appears that the best way to avoid this is to flat out ignore the law, rather than go along with it.

Your video gets taken down? Just put it back up again and hope it wont get found a second time.

Or just upload it to a non-Google service seen as Google are happy to bend over and let the music industry/hollywood do whatever they want.

> It reminds me of Soviets erasing people from history.

Because taking down a video of a dancing baby is comparable to a reign of terror that spawned "one million is a statistic"? Please, this kind of hyperbole just cheapens the tragedy.

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