Viacom's Copyright Bots Take Down 'Star Trek' Comic-con Panel Because These Bots Suck Out Loud

from the energize dept

We’ve argued for a long, long time that these automated copyright takedown bots that far too many media companies utilize are both broken and illuminate just how broken copyright takedown policies for streaming sites have become. The output of this broken system is shown when these bots take down totally legitimate content or when grifters abuse the system to try to take some measure of income away from small third-party streamers. But attempts at machine-based copyright enforcement are truly at their most satisfying when content companies employing these bots commit unintentional copyright seppuku.

This happens way more than you might think, but the latest version of this is Viacom briefly nuking its own Star Trek Comic-Con panel when the copyright borg misfired.

The panel included the cast and producers of Discovery doing a read-through of the first act of the season 2 finale, “Such Sweet Sorrow, Part 2.” The “enhanced” read-through included sound effects, effects shots, and storyboard images meant to bolster the actors as they delivered lines from their living rooms and home offices.

Even if the presentation didn’t look like a real episode of Discovery to the home viewer, it apparently sounded close enough: after the Star Trek Universe virtual panel began viewers began to lose access to the stream. In place of the video, YouTube displayed a content ID warning reading: “Video unavailable: This video contains content from CBS CID, who has blocked it on copyright grounds.

While it’s fun to laugh at the notoriously protective CBS for killing off its own stream, the reality is that even these instances are immensely frustrating. The fact is that instances like this should serve as an indication to CBS that something is very wrong with how it’s operating when its attempts at copyright protection result in its own promotional material getting taken down, however briefly.

But the introspection never comes, changes are never made, and instead CBS goes on its merry way likely shitting out mistaken copyright enforcement at plenty of others. I’d say that it at least gives me items to write about, but I don’t want to. The fact is that the system is broken, everyone knows it’s broken, and we have yet to even begin doing anything about it.

In fact, these automagic filtering systems are in such wide use that this same stream has to be unblocked by more parties as well.

Unfortunately, it seems an array of media companies are each going to have to rush to correct the error in turn: two hours later, io9 reporter Beth Elderkin tweeted that a Cartoon Network panel livestream was pulled offline due to a copyright claim from Turner, Cartoon Network’s parent company.

Again…broken. Beyond repair. And yet we’re not going to even try to fix it, because something something protecting the artists.

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Companies: viacom

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Comments on “Viacom's Copyright Bots Take Down 'Star Trek' Comic-con Panel Because These Bots Suck Out Loud”

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Anonymous Coward says:

It’s Viacom. The kings of asking YouTube to take down content Viacom posted themselves. What did you expect?

The only way copyright-types will ever learn is if they were on the receiving end of their own maximalism and hoisted upon their "notice and staydown" petard.

This comment has been deemed insightful by the community.
That Anonymous Coward (profile) says:

Something something I swear I’ve mentioned a few hundred times that any type of penalty for defective notices would immediately make them improve the systems.

They live in an imaginary world where they own everything, no one else can have anything, and if it even has a feel of something they own they own that too.

They can have a small penalty for the left hand taking down what the right hand was doing… but when it comes to taking down others content it should hurt a bit more.

Anonymous Coward says:

This is zero to do with protecting artists, no more than big record company’s want to protect artists, before the Internet was invented, the standard record company deal was company’s get the rights to all recording masters, most of the income from selling lps goes to the record company.
It’s to do with protecting revenue for big media corporations.
Does any big Corp exec care about streams taken down,
YouTube creators are getting hour long videos claimed because there’s 3 seconds of music in the background
The big corporations don’t care about ordinary YouTube users who make content

Stinnettejor (user link) says:

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