Viacom Wants Your Videos Destroyed

You probably already heard that Viacom demanded that YouTube take down thousands of videos that they claim is their intellectual property (Daily Show and Colbert Report clips, for example). Apparently they have also been demanding that many videos that have nothing to do with them be taken down as well.

Slashdot reports that the makers of the open source game engine Irrlicht have been told that one of their demonstration videos belongs to Viacom (it doesn't, by any stretch of the imagination). It is a homemade video of the capabilities of the software that they wrote. Slashdot commenter ack154 points out that Jim Moore of Harvard Law School had a home video of his taken down as well (Harvard blog story here). Yeah, messing with people at Harvard Law is just brilliant. "Extra credit, anyone?"

Anyway, as /. commenter Karzz1 points out:

So this means that the media companies can falsely claim copyright to *any* material and the publisher is provided an email by youtube. However, in order to counter, you (the publisher) have to send a snailmail to them and wait how long before something is done about it? Are you even guarenteed a response?

This is complete and utter bullsh-t. As we have seen in other articles [slashdot.org] this only provides the media companies with the means to takedown *anything* posted on youtube or any other similar site for that matter for any reason whatsoever. Talk about Freedom of Speech and anti-trust* issues.

* -- If I don't like something that is said about my product online... I can simply have it taken down with the DMCA.

Seems like it.

You can read an aggregation of Viacom vs. YouTube stories here.

--YY

p.s. Yes, I'm citing Slashdot commenters now. What a pain in the...
p.p.s. It looks like the Harvard case, at least, has been resolved.