Mr. Fuddlesticks is an anonymous YouTube user who posted embarrassing videos about the Renton, Washington, police department. They convinced a judge to let them request Mr. Fuddlesticks’ personal information from Google, YouTube’s parent company. While the charges were eventually dropped, Research Associate Nicole Ciandella thinks this highlights a major problem in applying telephone-era laws to the Internet era.
YouTube
[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=31i-rRUnMc8 285 234]
Today’s Daily Caller features an article from me about CEI’s entry in the EPA’s YouTube video contest on regulations, expertly produced by Drew Tidwell and Nicole Ciandella.
The theme of the video contest is “Let your voice be heard.” The problem is that over-regulation drowns out your voice in a cacophony of commands and controls from the minute you get up in the morning until you go to bed at night. The Code of Federal Regulations is 157,000 pages long. And it’s still growing. Enough is enough.
Hopefully CEI’s video isn’t the only entry that makes that important point.
Everything. Funny how easy it is to lose sight of that. This video by Caleb Brown shows you in less than three minutes just how much one couple put on the line just so that you can enjoy fine coffee and wine. Altruism is great, but it doesn’t convince people to risk losing their house so they can provide tasty beverages to complete strangers.
By the way, this video is part of a contest. The winner is decided by traffic. So if you like what you see, spread it around far and wide.
The Italian government is considering making it illegal for its citizens to post videos on the Internet without a license.
The free speech implications are obvious. But could the proposal also be a move to restrict unwanted economic competition against Italy’s state-dominated media?
Host Richard Morrison welcomes guest co-hosts Michelle Minton and Lee Doren to Episode 59 of the LibertyWeek podcast. This week we take a detour from the usual format and focus on the upcoming 9/12 March on Washington, where thousands of Americans from across the country will converge on Capitol Hill to protest record levels of government spending and borrowing. The demonstration is about defending our liberty and about restoring our Constitution by reducing the size and scope of the federal government.
Your host Richard Morrison welcomes returning guest co-host Jeremy Lott of the Capital Research Center and special guest Sean Higgins of Investor’s Business Daily for Episode 58 of the LibertyWeek podcast. We begin with a revolt against congressional incumbency, wicked and foolish climate policy and a political sea change in the land of the rising sun. We continue with a technology news interview with Ryan Radia and finish with some fiscally sound Olympic News.
O’Reilly writer Andy Oram makes the case that the assertion President-elect Barack Obama’s victory is in large part due to his campaign’s effective use of the internet is an overstatement, to say the least. Oram counters that when all is said and done, the mainstream media is what had the most significant impact on the elections.
I feel I have to temper the hype over how the Internet has changed elections. There’s no doubt that the Internet provides enormous potential, and that people have been using it in burgeoning numbers over the past four years to search for information, share ideas with friends, and form online coalitions. But several key observations show that the tipping point hasn’t arrived.
He goes on to give three points that illustrate why he feels this is the case:
1. Fund-raising proves the primacy of the mainstream media
2. Viral videos also prove the primacy of the mainstream media
3. Elections themselves have no Internet component
A U.S. district judge got it right yesterday when he refused to dismiss a lawsuit against Universal, ruling that copyright holders should take into account fair use prior to issuing DMCA takedown notices. The dispute arose last year when a woman received a takedown notice over a YouTube video featuring a kid dancing to a Prince song owned by Universal.
Over at Ars, fellow TLFer Tim Lee has a good overview of the issue in which he explains how the various legal arguments played out. EFF, which represents the plaintiff in the case, offered several compelling reasons why ignoring fair use in a takedown notice might actually constitute “bad faith” under the DMCA.
As Cord discussed a few months ago, my employer, the Competitive Enterprise Institute, recently received a meritless takedown notice for a global warming ad we posted on YouTube which featured about seven seconds from a copyrighted video clip. Our use of a trivial portion of a copyrighted video was clearly both transformative and non-commercial, yet the content owner still deemed it worthwhile to send us a takedown notice.
RSS Updates 
RSS E-Mail Updates 
Twitter 
Facebook 
CEI.org 
WorkPlaceChoice.org 
GlobalWarming.org 
CEI On Demand Video 
Liberty Week Podcast 