Judge Paul Called Me a Thief
I Was Tried In Abstentia, Convicted and Sent to Copyright School

It would be wrong for me to call Paul Brownstein a schmuck. After all, I've never met the man! So why is Paul Brownstein calling me a thief?

Public.Resource.Org runs the FedFlix channel, a popular channel with 6,061 videos gleaned from deep inside the vaults of the U.S. government. The International Amateur Scanning League, a group of volunteers based in Washington, D.C., went to the National Archives and found unused videos produced by the government. They send us the DVDs, we rip them and find metadata, and it gets upload to YouTube and the Internet Archive. We've had over 20 million views for these videos.

On YouTube, there is a system called ContentID, which allows the owner of video to claim ownership of video or audio. The ContentID system then keeps an eye out for kids uploading the video. The purported owner is then able to take a variety of actions, ranging from simply doing nothing to blocking the display of the video in certain countries, to muting the audio, monetizing the video by forcing advertisements before it plays or as an overlay, or the most extreme action of executing a removal of the offending bits.

If the purported owner decides to remove the video because it is in allegedly in violation of copyright, the person who uploaded the offending video gets an Official Copyright Strike on their account. When you get a strike, you have to go to Copyright School, which consists of watching a video about the copyright laws, then taking a test. If you pass the test, and this is only your first strike, your account is put on a kind of probation for 6 months, which means you loose certain powers, such as the ability to designate your videos as Creative Commons licensed so others can use it. If you get 3 strikes on your account, your account is TERMINATED.

Public.Resource.Org has 326 ContentID matches on our account. In many cases, the matches are totally bogus. Using the ContentID Dispute procedure, we're able to submit a brief explanation of why we believe the ContentID match was mistaken, or why this is fair use, or why we have authorization to be using the disputed material. A good summary of these issues and the situation we found ourselves in was printed in the Guardian by Cory Doctorow:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2011/dec/12/pirates-of-youtube-cory-doctorow

After Doctorow's piece appeared, we finished our research on the provenance of the videos, talked to the General Counsel at NARA and at YouTube, and began to systematically dispute many of the matches. You can view our dispute log here:

https://public.resource.org/ntis.gov/contentid.html

Out of the 326 ContentID matches, as of today we were able to clear 250 of the claims and make them disappear. However, there are still quite a few ContentID matches that no action has been taken on and there is really nothing we can do about it.