Sleepycatz

For Me and Not for Thee

Oh, this is great. Earlier this year, Christopher Knight made a video to promote his run for the Board of Education in Rockingham County, NC. He posted his video to you-tube, and because it was clever and funny it got a lot of attention. VH-1 decided to include Mr. Knight’s video in it’s Web Junk 2.0 show. Mr. Knight, excited to see his video broadcast internationally, posted a copy of his segment of Web Junk 2.0 on You-Tube. Viacom, the parent of VH-1, then issued a take down order to You-Tube, and threatened Mr. Knight with copyright infringement. So to recap: Knight made a video which Viacom then broadcast without Knight’s permission; Knight posted a copy of that video showing his original video online and was sited for copyright violation of his own original material.

This is an example of the complete insanity which has come out of the copyright wars. Under Viacom’s logic, once they use someone else’s content they own it. But it is more likely that Viacom has just decided that if you are not a multi-national media company you have no copyright protection.

This entry was posted by steve on Friday, August 31st, 2007 at 11:06 am and is filed under Injustices, Internet. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.