Thursday, July 31, 2014

Update: My YouTube Copyright Strike Has Been Removed.

Great news today! My YouTube (c) strike has been removed.
You can read the original story here
Upon review of the video I still have absolutely no idea why NamHuy.net issued the DMCA take down in the first place and I probably never will. The video WAS created by me, and I used no clips or sound effects except those from iMovie which I am licensed to use. Furthermore the product shown was covered under the GPL, and the software shown was not created by NamHuy.net. I DO know that most takedowns include where in the video the offending clip is, but this one has none of that, or ANY information so not really much to go on.

Basically what I did was:

1) Tried to contact NamHuy.net through their (his) contact form, email address AND twitter feed to get them (him) to either let me know what was offending or send a retraction to YouTube. This would have been the best way and is how most of these issues are cleared up. Unfortunately despite all of my attempts to contact them (him) I got not response, so on to the "much less preferred way".

2) Counter the Copyright Strike. I do NOT recommend doing this, and you better be DAMN SURE that you are not using someone else's material (or that you have rights to the material) because YOU CAN GET SUED! Next to your strike notification is a link entitled "Submit Counter-Notification".
Clicking this allowed me to indicate that I was asserting my rights to my video. I had a long discussion with my Wife about this before starting because it is, as mentioned above, opening me up for litigation. NamHuy.net would have to sue me within 14 days to stop the re-posting of the video. We counted up our dollars, took on some mild legal advise and decided that while the video makes me NO MONEY AT ALL, my wife was onboard with defending my rights: We would not be bullied even if it meant we had to fight. Honestly it is not so dramatic: somewhere between almost no-one and no-one have actually been sued over a YouTube video, but you really have to take the possibility into consideration. By submitting the Counter-Notification I was allowing NamHuy to get my personal contact information so they could begin litigation. So I submitted and waited.... and waited.... Finally late last night I got the following email:

My YouTube station is again strike-free! In the end I'm glad I fought this, not because I felt the video was that important, but because I know I am in the right -- and I refuse to allow someone to wrongly remove my videos on a whim.

By the way, if you want to view the video you can't. I have removed it because Netflix no-longer uses Silverlight for movie playback and Ubuntu users can watch videos just like everyone else. The vid has been obsolete for months. Happy endings all around.

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