YouTube Purges LiberalViewer’s Account
By Sam McManis, The Sacramento Bee, Calif.
Feb. 8–One day, you are a minor YouTube celebrity with more than 1,850 subscribers to your personal channel and nearly 1 million viewings of your videos logged.
The next day — poof! — it’s as if you never existed.
Such is the fate of Allen Asch, a Sacramento man who went by the nom de Web of LiberalViewer. When Viacom last week demanded that YouTube, the popular online video site, remove more than 100,000 videos containing unauthorized content, it meant that some of the LiberalViewer’s work soon would be purged from the site.
But Asch was surprised to find this week that his entire YouTube account has been expunged. Only about one-third of Asch’s 60 uploads to YouTube included Viacom snippets, but all trace of his work — and his channel — was erased.
“While I never set out to gain the popularity I have, I’ve invested hundreds of hours of my time, created a huge network of friends and subscribers, and gotten links to my videos from Web sites all over the world,” Asch says. “None of those links work now, and I’ve lost access to the entire network.”
For the past seven months, Asch had posted short news analyses, using brief clips from Fox News, CNN and two Viacom-owned shows — “The Colbert Report” and “The Daily Show With Jon Stewart” — as jumping-off points for his political musings. Ironically, one of the links to a LiberalViewer posting was on Comedy Central’s own Web site.
In November, YouTube took down several of Asch’s videos. But during the intervening months, he had posted with nary a response from YouTube or Viacom — until this week.
A YouTube spokesman said federal law requires that companies terminate the accounts of repeat infringers.
“Our community guidelines … on the site make it clear that users must own or have permission from copyright holders to post any videos,” the YouTube spokesman said. “We take copyright issues very seriously.”
Asch, a former public defender in Placer County, is checking into whether his videos could be protected under the “fair use” doctrine — which gives media the right to run snippets of video to illustrate a news story or commentary. Whether a vlogger such as Asch qualifies as a media entity is up for debate, legal experts say.
Asch, apparently, is not alone in seeing non-infringed work expunged during the recent Viacom purging. For example, a user named Matt Hawes had a video parody of MTV’s “The Real World” taken down, even though it was labeled as parody and did not use footage or logos from the Viacom-owned show.
As part of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, YouTube is required to take down material when asked by the copyright holder. By doing so, YouTube absolves itself from liability for content posted by its users.
But Asch worries that Viacom and YouTube have “cast too wide a net without making the legally required good-faith effort to make sure (content taken down) is actually infringing material.”
YouTube’s “terms of use” agreement states that an account can be suspended if any copyright violations are found.
“I greatly respect and enjoy the products of both YouTube and Viacom, and I’m not looking for a confrontation with anyone,” says Asch, later adding, “I feel like two big corporations are fighting without thinking about how their actions affect the little people like me.”
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Copyright (c) 2007, The Sacramento Bee, Calif.
Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Business News.
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