Jimquisition: Copyright War

[Bad Jim]

Problem is that Fair Use is severely outdated and needs to be changed or update to apply to modern day media.

It's not really the law on Fair Use that's the problem. The problem is that it is never tested in court. It it was, a judge might decide that Let's Plays could be sufficiently transformative to be protected by fair use. Actual court cases have shown judges to be quite reasonable a lot of the time.

 

[Aardvaarkman]

They entirely ignore that free communication is also a moral good by default, as if it would all be a form of asking for "free stuff" out of other people's property, rather than a freedom which their control blocks by it's presence.

Uh, what? I'm not seeing what this has to do with "free communication" or where "free communication" is defined as a legal or moral right.

You might have also heard about it as "freedom of speech", "freedom of expression", or based on the Universal Declaration of Human Rights; "the right to seek, recieve and impart information".

Which essentially has nothing to do with communication or copyright. "Communication" is not the same thing as "speech" or "expression."

Intellectual property is a misleading analogy. A figure of speech, that makes sense in a very narrow context, and breaks down in all others.

Controlling monopolistic regulations over other people's information sharing (a.k.a. communication, self-expression, knowledge), is not at all similar to ownership of object.

That phrase leads to the unneccessary growth of copyright regulation, under the assumption that if information (such as a game) is "owned" by someone, then this ownership must be as long-term, as wide, and as inherently desirable, as with objects.

Let's break this down. How is the "ownership of objects" more important or desirable than the ownership of creative or intellectual output?

That seems rather backwards to me. What gives you the right to "own" physical objects? These objects are not created with a specific owner in mind - they are typically atoms and molecules that have been created by natural processes. Any "ownership" of these objects typically comes about due to violence or other dubious actions.

For example: the ownership of land and mineral resources is largely determined by who wins wars. Your ancestors defeated some other tribe, and claimed ownership of the land that they lived on. What makes this "ownership" so sacrosanct, regardless of the lives lost in the process? Physical ownership often result in many other atrocities such as pollution, slave labor, cultural appropriation,exploitation, etc.

Now, let's contrast this with "intellectual property" - such as writing a novel based on your life experience. That story is uniquely tied to yourself. It's hard to imagine a more intimate and real form of property than something created by your own brain. Anybody can dig rocks out of the ground. That's why things like oil and gold are called "commodities." But nobody else has your brain or your experiences.

To me, this makes "intellectual property" a much more valid form of ownership and property than physical objects.

For most people, their ownership of objects is a quirk of happenstance - you were lucky enough to be born into a society which defeated some other society, and therefore had the means to take possession of land. People "inherit" this physical wealth and pass it on to their offspring. Now, why exactly is this more valid than people owning or passing on the things that they have created with their brains, rather than digging up from the ground, or killing people over?

The illusion that all ideas should be "owned" unless justified by vital needs for Fair Use, is a complete reversal of all speech being free by default, unless necessarily limited by a regulation (with a particular pragmatic purpose).

You can't own ideas, even under current intellectual property laws. You can only own the expression of ideas, not the ideas themselves.

This leads to cases like this, with publishers attacking derivative works without any clearly defined need to do so, solely out of a sense of desire for controlling "their property".

And of course, that never happens with physical property at all. It's not like there are any land and property disputes that date back hundreds or thousands of years (sarcasm).

Seriously, these intellectual property games are very small potatoes compared to the ongoing fights over physical property, which cost hundreds of actual human lives per day. I'd rather have people who care about intellectual property over those barbarians any day of the week.

 

[Silentpony_v1legacy]

So...why is it that YouTube channels that get special permission to post footage of games are consider 'suspicious' and 'questionable' (The implication being they've sold out to some degree) but game critics who get free games and game consoles are completely legit and 100% above being bought off so easily?

I ask you, what is the difference between a channel that agrees to give a game a positive review in exchange for video permission and a critic who agrees to give a game a positive review in exchange for free games/consoles?

I'm not saying Jim is like that, far from it. It just seems like an odd argument to make given that about a month ago he and I talked on these forums about the objectivity of game critics who got advanced copies of the PS4.

 

[AdmiralMatt]

When a company puts their trailers on Facebook or other social media, do they have to sign the same "release of all copyright claims" agreement that we do?

 

[Hellfireboy]

Nintendo, Sega, and Capcom aren't run by "dusty old white men." They're run by dusty old Asian men. Satoru Iwata, Hajime Satomi, and Kenzo Tsujimoto respectively. They just happen to be using the asinine state of American copyright law to dick over American their consumers. I the US the entertainment industry has an extraordinarily incestuous relationship with the government so that there are five RIAA lawers in the DoJ and one of them is the Solicitor General. In addition the head of the MPAA is former Connecticut Senator Chris Dodd who was the chairman of the Senate Banking committee prior to that. Considering the inroads that they have made to get their place at the table it is little wonder that foreign company would take advantage of the playing field that they created.

 

[Alpha Maeko]

I don't care if this whole thing was an accident or on purpose or whatever.

I still agree with Jim that they've gone too far. Even having that sort of thing made possible means it's ridiculously easy for people who've done nothing wrong to get screwed by the automated system.

Guilty until proven innocent doesn't sit well with me.

 

[Roxas1359]

It's not really the law on Fair Use that's the problem. The problem is that it is never tested in court. It it was, a judge might decide that Let's Plays could be sufficiently transformative to be protected by fair use. Actual court cases have shown judges to be quite reasonable a lot of the time.

Our best bet would honestly be the US Supreme Court taking the case then because lower court rulings can get overturned quite a bit, but with how slow the Supreme Court is when it comes to certain issues, combine with the fact that as you said is that it's not fully been tested in courts, then the hope is slim.

 

[shadowstriker86]

Guys, can we PLEASE get Jim into the oval office or something? Already a proven leader with millions of loyal viewers ready to vote him in, what's the holdup?

I would imagine that Jim not being born in the United States would be a significant holdup.

considering that leadership skills > country of origin is a better way to look, there's still people in congress who quote the bible to counter global warming arguments. not even joking about that.

 

[Bad Jim]

So...why is it that YouTube channels that get special permission to post footage of games are consider 'suspicious' and 'questionable' (The implication being they've sold out to some degree) but game critics who get free games and game consoles are completely legit and 100% above being bought off so easily?

I ask you, what is the difference between a channel that agrees to give a game a positive review in exchange for video permission and a critic who agrees to give a game a positive review in exchange for free games/consoles?

I'm not saying Jim is like that, far from it. It just seems like an odd argument to make given that about a month ago he and I talked on these forums about the objectivity of game critics who got advanced copies of the PS4.

Game reviewers typically get almost every game they review for free. They cannot give them all positive reviews without looking silly. And any professional will value their integrity at far more than $60.

A Let's Player is dependent on just one game, and being the only Let's Player allowed to do a certain game is, financially at least, worth sacrificing integrity for.

 

[Triality]

I don't know if someone else has said this already but I don't have time to read 6 pages of comments, but I'm disappointed Jim didn't bring up honest to goodness Fair Use in his argument. Because out of the whole of all the videos taken down, more than 90% could be considered criticism (in long form) or parody (in PewdiePies' awful case, considering all the voice over commenting he does). I hope this gets an injunction from a civil rights attorney, special interest group, or judge for that matter. This IS in-fact an outrage.

This act by Youtube and publishers was a bridge too far.

 

[awdrifter]

Another option would just be posting a non-gameplay video linking to a privately hosted gameplay video. If Youtube still wants to crack it down they can, but it'll be a much more manual process. For the people who does playthrough videos for fun they can just use a different site. Dailymotion or even Chinese sites like Youku might be the way to go. Basically just go outside of US and Google.

 

[Requia]

Its a terrible thing really - a real kick in the nuts to anyone wanting to showcase anything about a video game...

But as Jim said: It also pisses off the LP and gaming community, leading to more reviewers not giving a shit about the publishers anymore... which might lead to more indie games getting coverage instead of triple-A games, and I really like that.

...but ya, US copyright law (heck, global copyright law, ideally) needs a serious revision

This is way way past US Copyright law, Google is only obliged to take down things a *human* reports to them, not to make bots, and they have to put it back up if a counter-DMCA is filed.

 

[Eve Charm]

At the end of the day, a publisher or a copyright owner should be allowed to call BS on someone making money off their work, IF they want to. It's about the money, it's always about the money.

I don't agree with selling "Youtube rights" to people, Google themselves should Call BS on that. If they are going to take down their content they should have to take all of it down, not nitpick left and right so they can create a false product.

At the end of the day a sane medium should be a copyright holder should be able to claim up to %50 percent of the revenue of someone playing their game, That's probably what in the end would happen for youtube to stay what it is.

But Jim is right at the end, A good LPer doesn't need a triple A game, or the devs that want to be greedy as hell. They can live off their own and other sources like Twitch and subscriptions and donations, and merch.

 

[Darken12]

Is this war I hear? MAN THE BALLISTAE! ARCHERS TO THE ROOFTOPS!

Well said, Jim. Fear is the only way these people get the control they so desperately crave. Deny them that fear, deny them the fear and watch them spiral into stereotypical villain breakdown as control slips through their fingers.

 

[SageRuffin]

Something like this happened to me a few times just a few years ago. I had gotten Asura's Wrath (shut up! I like the game!) and made a little "Replay" of going through the first episode. About 2 days later it was flagged for copyright shit.

A more baffling incident happened with SR3: I had put up a "Replay" of going through one of the missions and it got flagged. The weird thing is that I had put up several videos before and nothing was wrong. In fact, I have a theory about why that happened: one of the songs featured in the game in the game set off the little copyright flag, and it just so happened that in the previous videos the song never came up. It's just a theory of course; I may never know what exactly set that flag off.

But yeah, like some others have said, feel free to strike down people's videos. We still have Twitch, UStream, Own3d, and a plethora of other sites where we can show off our "l33t gaemin' sk33lZ."

 

[Requia]

To Jim's claim he doesn't need the game publishers:

Like half your shows are about the publishers being raging assholes, what are you going to rant about if they go away?

 

[Deroo]

At the end of the day, a publisher or a copyright owner should be allowed to call BS on someone making money off their work, IF they want to. It's about the money, it's always about the money.

I don't agree with selling "Youtube rights" to people, Google themselves should Call BS on that. If they are going to take down their content they should have to take all of it down, not nitpick left and right so they can create a false product.

At the end of the day a sane medium should be a copyright holder should be able to claim up to %50 percent of the revenue of someone playing their game, That's probably what in the end would happen for youtube to stay what it is.

But Jim is right at the end, A good LPer doesn't need a triple A game, or the devs that want to be greedy as hell. They can live off their own and other sources like Twitch and subscriptions and donations, and merch.

Thank you. I was going to say exactly the same thing. At the end of the day regardless of how much transformation you make to the original content ie a review or let's play you are essentially using someone else's work without their permission to make a profit off it. If someone else did this in any other industry or profession can you imagine the shit storm.

There needs to be a way that lets players and reviewer's can make money but the content owners can be compensated too. It's the only way youtube can move forward. Reviewer's need to be compensated for their work but your purchase of the game doesn't cover using the game to make a profit without the owners permission.

 

[Strazdas]

Not sure about age requirements in US, but here we have restriction that people younger than i think 30 cannot go to our equivalent of oval office. 45 years for president. I believe Jim is younger (if i remember correctly from dismal jester)

just looked it up right now, age req. is 35. That sucks. Do they just put 35 because it's at an age where they "think" (and i use the word very lightly) people are less inclined to disagree with sponsers?

I dont know what their reasoning is but here the reasoning is that people at that age are more "Experienced" less inclined to do things just out of impulse and are more "Settled". bsically its agasint extremism. This is kinda why the government always seems to be comprised of old people with old values - thats the only legally accepted candidate to begin with.

They can say whatever they want in their EULAs. That doesn't make it legally binding. The US and most modern countries have laws the supersede a lot of the boilerplate written into such statements.

The publisher can claim you need a license to use their footage all they want, but they don't have a leg to stand on if your usage falls under fair use or other protected categories. It's not that much different than somebody claiming in a contract that they have the right to kill you if you sign the contract. It's not legal, no matter how they state it.

Actually in EU EULA has aboslutely no legla claim even if the laws do not supercede it. This is because EULA is not a legally binding contract. The only way to make EULA legally binding is to make us sign it BEFORE we buy the game (and i mean actually sign it, not just press accept, that doesnt work).
Here in eurpo you can easily ignore EULA because it is nothing but a waste of bytes.

You may call yourself a "consumer" but I do not. I'm a person.

You can be both a consumer and a person.

For example: me.

I'm not sure I understand you, but I have the feeling that you are reading my posts out of their context.

I have presented the publishers' perspective, and how they are justifying copyright, but in the famework that their justifications are WRONG.

How they are using the public's perception of property as an "inalienable human right", to argue that copyright should work similarly.

Fair enough. I was under the impression you are proposing such perception as correct one.

We are talking about the moral justifications that people use for legal rights here. Sure, property is protected by laws, but the reason that those laws exist, is that securing property in it's owner's hands is considered morally virtous.

Yes and no. Laws were created (and ideally should be changed according to) to maximize benefit for everyone involved based on what public at that time thinks is the most beneficial. You could say that such benefit is where morality comes from (i dont think its beneficial to kill random people, hence i dont think it is moral). Moral is a blanket term when you lack knowledge of the reason you think like you do.

Theft isn't just wrong because it is illegal, but it is desired to be illegal because even if it wouldn't be, theft would be called a "Malum in se", an axiomatic wrong, something that is wrong by it's very nature.

Yes, it is. There is no "universal morality". Wrong is just a term to define "dislike". There is nothing wrong by its very nature. Only what we agree upon as undesirable.

The problem with treating a game as property, is that unlike a single object owned by a single person, this "IP" has many people's interests in it, from the creators and the publishers, to the players and the LP video producers, who all feel entitled to use and copy and control it in certain ways.

the problem is not Unique to IPs. lets take a car as example. a whole group of people designed and created it, a different guilt built it, another group has sold it, and a fourth group is driving it. On top of that there is yet another group that is controlling it and yet another group that is creating rules of how you can use it (driving laws). Ther are a lot of groups that have interest in the car and how you use it. And we had seen all the same problems crop up with invention of cars till we found a solution that works somewhat.

snip

thank you for taking the tiem to answer the questions.

indeed i have gone blind and missed the mirophone icon, that does make it a lot more sensible. Though how does one differentiate from a Lets Play and a commentary that goes about "Explaining walktrough" (because is aw walktroughs where it would go like "press X and A here to do damage" and stuff and thats not a lets play material.
That can be easily found out by just trying though so i guess im just being petty. (i also noticed that you got advertisement that autoplays a video. mighty annoying. its source is "player6.sfw" so i guess thats a local ad that you folks can control?)

The game was from 2009, however the list said it was added in 2011, and in 2011 the HD was more prominent. though we still see a lot of non-HD videos on youtube (including my own 720p videos) so fair enough. Still i expected something closer to not-ovelycompressed 480p and saw what looked like somone using a phone camera to film his game.
Still, i may just be unlucky so ill go check more videos.
And i did, i checked the ones marked HD. while in HD it looks well, but in SD it looks a lot like your codec is overzealous and compresses too much. Fair enough, i know full well how big the files get if you have to host them yourself, but comparing even to the terrible youtube compression this felt worse. Doesnt mean i wotn be coming back, the site looks cool and i especially love how you list the lenght of the thing, i used to have to look at the lists on youtube to decide if i should even start watching it or its a guy that drops it after few videos (because that happens a lot).
Another problem i noticed is with buffering, it seems to just not load fast enough to keep up even with SD stream and keeps popping the "loading animation" on the screen. though this could be caused on my end as i am currently at work and the internet here sometimes get loaded (we got 500+ machines on one massive fiberoptics line). I should try from home there i got a stable 100mbps line that can handle HD stream anytime with ease.
Thank you for showing me this site, i will definitely be visiting.

 

[Requia]

Thank you. I was going to say exactly the same thing. At the end of the day regardless of how much transformation you make to the original content ie a review or let's play you are essentially using someone else's work without their permission to make a profit off it. If someone else did this in any other industry or profession can you imagine the shit storm.

Somehow I don't think they got Romero's permission to make Walking Dead.

 

[Strazdas]

considering that leadership skills > country of origin is a better way to look, there's still people in congress who quote the bible to counter global warming arguments. not even joking about that.

It should be leadership skills > country of origins. It, however, is not.

Another option would just be posting a non-gameplay video linking to a privately hosted gameplay video. If Youtube still wants to crack it down they can, but it'll be a much more manual process. For the people who does playthrough videos for fun they can just use a different site. Dailymotion or even Chinese sites like Youku might be the way to go. Basically just go outside of US and Google.

wouldnt a better solution for that would be just moving to new site entirely then? your still hosting it outside. And hosting stuff yourself? Even me with my very stable 100mbps connection wouldnt want to host streaming service.

At the end of the day, a publisher or a copyright owner should be allowed to call BS on someone making money off their work, IF they want to. It's about the money, it's always about the money.

Making moeny of their work, sure. LPers are NOT doing that though. LPers are making money of THEIR OWN work.

Thank you. I was going to say exactly the same thing. At the end of the day regardless of how much transformation you make to the original content ie a review or let's play you are essentially using someone else's work without their permission to make a profit off it. If someone else did this in any other industry or profession can you imagine the shit storm.

There needs to be a way that lets players and reviewer's can make money but the content owners can be compensated too. It's the only way youtube can move forward. Reviewer's need to be compensated for their work but your purchase of the game doesn't cover using the game to make a profit without the owners permission.

By posting this reply you are:
using the work of computer designed for your benefit.
Using the work of computer manufacturer for your benefit.
Using the work of webside designed for your benefit.
Using the work of Jim video making for your benefit.
Plenty of other stuff as well, the list can go on and on.
Compensate them? No? Maybe you shouldn't argue that that then.