Last week saw the disappearance of Marco Travaglio’s video called "I bertoladri {the Bertolaso thieves}" in his series of Passaparola broadcasts. The film reappeared after a couple of days following on from actions by my staff. The motive reported by YouTube for the removal of the video was: "This video is no longer available following a violation of copyright complaint from Mediaset".
Travaglio was interviewed in his own home with fixed framing. Neither he nor his home are (for now) owned by Mediaset. Copyright on words and on citizens has not yet been brought into law. In the future, perhaps, to appear on the Internet, you’ll have to ask permission from Ghedini. YouTube was obliged to remove the film. The violation of copyright by recognised third parties makes that operation automatic. Anyone who has suffered the deletion can complain if they take on the responsibility of any violation that is brought to light. Normally the film, if legal, is put back in the public domain within a few hours. In this case, that didn’t happen. A few days plus emails and telephone calls were needed. In the end, a really embarrassed YouTube restored the video and sent the following message to the blog: “On the orders of the judge for the civil case promoted in front of the Civil Tribunal in Rome by RTI against YouTube, we were ordered to allow the Consultant appointed by the judge to carry out checks on the correct functioning of the system of “Content ID”. The removal of the video in question came about during these checks without the knowledge of YouTube. As soon as we found out, we started taking action to resolve the inconvenience by contacting the Consultant. It has to be remembered that YouTube is a “hosting Service Provider” and in the case of notifications relating to copyright it has the obligation to remove the content indicated.”
Summary:
- there’s an ongoing court case between RTI of the Mediaset group and YouTube
- the Rome Tribunal has appointed a technical person to check on the way that videos are managed on YouTube
- out of millions of videos, the technical person checks on Travaglio’s video relating to Bertolaso and he blacks it out without informing YouTube
- the video is not restored after the checking operation
- the video is blacked out by declaring what is false: "violation of copyright".
How many times has the law been violated for a single video? I’ll ask my lawyers.
The most serious aspect of this affair is not in relation to my blog, but the removal of hundreds of bloggers’ videos, which were probably perfectly legitimate, with the excuse of copyright. They will never give up (but is it in their interests?). Neither will we.