YouTube: centralization copyright censorship

or: catching some dolphins in a driftnet

I think the phenomenon of amateurs, musicians, and many other people publishing all kinds of videos on YouTube is hip, zeitgeisty, and overall quite favorable – as readers of this blog probably have noted during the last two or three weeks. However, the centralized architecture of YouTube does distress myself a bit. If a giant media conglomerate can request the deletion of 100′000 videos claiming copyright conflicts, it troubles me somewhat that dear YouTube – remember it’s Google now – is embracing the request wholeheartedly without much checking. Suprisingly it turns out the selection of those videos was not that fine-grained. Some actually did not violate Viacom’s copyrights. Others would actually fall in the category of fair use.

This kind of behaviour of our beloved mass media monsters providing stultifying entertainment instead of contexts for free speech explains a lot about the condition of the societies we live in. The revolution will not be televised nor uploaded to YouTube.

Have you noted that i’m all for decentralizing and democratizing resource sharing communities? Well, actually i am somewhat involved in a prototype allowing decentralized photo sharing. If you ask me, i think we should articulate and stress more the little fact of centralization of most webtwoish providers.

via netzpolitik.org: Wurden Deine Youtube-Videos von Viacom gelöscht?