Originally published at: TV Museum YouTube channel hosting ancient ads threatened by Sony takedowns | Boing Boing
…
4 Likes
The copyright on ads should expire as soon as the products they advertise are no longer made.
6 Likes
“Be evil” is just the reflex action for these companies. It doesn’t matter if it actually protects or benefits them in any way, they’ll do it because it’s all they know now.
7 Likes
Just checked out Future Cop (with Ernest Borgnine) and Gemini Man (“A curly brown-haired fellow I know you’ll love!”)…
Kids these days don’t know how good they have it, TV-wise!
3 Likes
It really isn’t. The whole point of copyright is to secure the right to profit from creative works. The programming the museum has on their YouTube channel is no longer profitable, or never was. If it were, the rights holders would be coming after the museum. In the case of ads, if the products are still being made, then it’s free advertising. Why would anyone complain? And if they aren’t, then the ads are no longer profitable. In short, nothing the museum has on their website is robbing any rights holders of their ability to make money in the marketplace. And assuming the museum is not-for-profit, those two facts combined make it almost a certainty that their uploads of these videos fall within the fair use exception to copyright infringement. YouTube just generally doesn’t like to make that call. Hopefully Sony will step in and do the right thing here, but going forward, the museum would be better off if they keep a list of asshole companies who pull this shit, and just not air any content related to them. Music YouTubers have learned this the hard way.
5 Likes
Sony’s probably worried people might remember they once made products you wanted to buy.
Nowadays with the exception of Playstation, why would you look at Sony? They’ve lost all their awesome design skills and the stuff looks and works pretty much the same as everyone else’s kit.
5 Likes
The only reason I can think of is if their older ads were extremely offensive, like the outrageously sexist airline magazine ads from the 1960s, and they want to distance themselves from their gross past. Somehow I doubt that’s the case, though. It just boils down to “We need to protect our copyright, but thinking is hard so let’s have an algorithm mindlessly erase every trace of our brand from the internet as though so much as mentioning our existence is a crime. ‘Fair use’? I’ve never heard that term before, I’m a soulless corporate bean counter who is as close to a mindless algorithm as an actual human being can get.”
3 Likes
If all they were doing was uploading old commercials or clips that were never meant to be aired then great. But they aren’t doing that. They are uploading entire episodes. How did they think they could upload an entire episode and not get it taken down? While I morally agree that old shows should be in the public domain, legally they aren’t and so they shouldn’t be surprised that they are getting in trouble.
1 Like
I am a huge Fuzzy Memories fan and have been since he went live on YouTube 15 or so years ago. The weird thing is that he was continuously having issues with YouTube in the early days and then offloaded his content to his fuzzymemories.tv site and mostly killed the original Fuzzymemories channel outside if a commercial for Stay Alive featuring Vincent Price.
This has been a known problem for Fuzzy. WGN forced him to offload a bunch of Bozo content that has never on his YouTube channel since. I’m especially disappointed that his encode of Lou Rawls WGN You’re the Heart of Chicago commercial is nowhere to be found. There are other versions, but his was best.
It seems that site has not been updated in ages and has been pending a renewal for around 4 years.
In recent years, Fuzzy began redoubling his YouTube efforts.
Fuzzy needs to cut the crap and proceed with the renewal of his site and put everything there. Or if money is a problem, upload it to archive.org (why does nobody want to use The Internet Archive for Non-profit, not monitized content?).
Uploading a bunch of off-air Bewitched recordings is foolish when the show still commands rights fees in several regions. Cartoon Samantha is even the mascot for a chain of gas stations in Japan. Don’t play games with YouTube’s copyright algorithm and copyright trollies, you could win but the downtime to your channel is not worth the time lost.
I am not even suggesting Fuzzy is wrong, I think his approach is foolish knowing what happened he already knows.
As I said in my previous post, Fuzzy left YouTube almost a decade ago for this exact same reason. The channel was getting legal threats and copyright flags. He made his own site and when things cooled down he decided to upload his new content to YouTube again.
I never understood the strategy. Go to The Internet Archive or fix fuzzymemories.tv. YouTube isn’t letting him monetize the videos … What’s the point?
I remember when Sony was the company who installed rootkits on their customers’ computers. So not much has changed.
3 Likes
That’s the association that will forever come to mind for me. Sony should have been sued and fined into a deep smoking crater after that.
3 Likes
This topic was automatically closed after 5 days. New replies are no longer allowed.
