Guilty Until Proven Innocent
Our site recently received a notification from YouTube that 20th Century Fox had demanded that the trailer we had posted for the game Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer be removed because it was in violation of copyright laws. YouTube immediately complied, served us with a warning, and left us to prove our innocence. Prove our innocence? Isn’t this America, where you’re innocent until proved guilty? Adding further insult to this injury is the fact that apparently no one at Fox or YouTube even bothered to watch the video. If they had, they would have seen that it was a videogame trailer and did not contain any movie footage whatsoever. Had they bothered to ask, I would have been happy to inform them that the video was provided to us by 2K Games with full permission for public display. Instead some corporate lawyer from Fox screamed guilty and YouTube immediately cowered.
It seems strange to me that Fox would be so protective of what it mistakenly thought was a movie trailer. Trailers are essentially free publicity for movies, and you’d think it would occur to them that this is a good thing for their business. However, it is within their right to be boneheaded about this and jealously protect distribution of their trailers. Yet in this case it’s not even their trailer. They are scouring the Internet for copyright violations and the people that are doing so on their behalf aren’t even that good at it. My guess is that some keyword search popped up our posting of the trailer and immediately triggered a threatening letter to YouTube. However, in under a minute of searching I was able to find this same trailer all over the internet, including YouTube itself (www.youtube.com/watch?v=vjNnjKMCv8g). How did their internet goon squad miss all of these other copies of the trailer? (Hey Fox, those little numbers on the bottom page of the search results mean that there’s more than one page. ) If copyright protection is so important to Fox, why are they so bad at it?
So thanks to Fox, I had to waste my time and send a formal letter to YouTube contesting the allegation. I hope that YouTube bothers to watch the trailer this time and has the integrity to inform the Fox corporate giant that it was mistaken, but we shall see. I’ll follow-up on this blog entry with the results. I may now be guilty until proven innocent, but at least I still have my right of free speech.
October 19th, 2007 at 5:14 pm
I just wanted to follow-up on this and let everyone know that we won. Fox did not choose to pursue this after we filed a counter-notice and the video has been restored to the site. Victory is mine! (Whoops! That could be taken as a quote from a Fox TV show!)