Viacom's demand that YouTube remove over 100,000 clips that it claimed violated Viacom's copyrights has provoked an uproar on the Internet as numerous legitimate videos were suddenly removed without notice. Jim Moore, a senior fellow at Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet and Society, discovered that his "Sunday nite dinner at Redbones", a 30-second clip of himself and friends at a ribs joint in Somerville, MA, had been yanked, possibly because Redbones bears a name strikingly similar to that of Viacom Chairman Sumner Redstone. YouTube also sent warning notices to those who had posted the clips, threatening them with deletion of all of their videos if a repeat incident should occur. The popular British blog Boing Boing called the action "shockingly bad behavior" and chastised YouTube for allowing Viacom to "indiscriminately censor the content it hosts." John Palfrey at the Berkman Center at Harvard Law School posted a message on the Center's site from a non-U.S. resident who wrote: "The video that they pulled was an original work that took me around five months to make, that has been shown in a film festival, and I feel violated." Another blogger wrote that "My YouTube account has been disabled because Viacom pulled some s**t about my giant swing video."
06/02/2007
