Hello, all,
It's come to our attention (through multiple submissions of the same video) that Fight for the Future has launched a highly time-sensitive campaign to promote fair-use by publicising the fact that the U.S. Copyright Office is currently receiving feedback on the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.
And—and here's the important part—they need your input before the end of the day on Friday. As in April 1st.
The timing is wildly unfortunate, but this is absolutely not an April Fool's joke.
We've spoken by phone to Evan Greer, Campaign Director of Fight For the Future, to confirm that everything is above board, and that the site which they've done a fantastic job in getting ready at such short notice is the best way to submit your comments. The official Copyright Office site has been under heavy load, but the Fight For the Future site (as I understand it) queues comments for submission, and so is the better choice here.
(You may remember Fight For the Future from their involvement in the anti-SOPA online protests in 2012; they're a great organisation that does important work in digital activism.)
Why is this here?
After a brief discussion amongst the available mods, and with several of you who have contacted us already via modmail, it's clear that this is an issue which is of direct relevance to the /r/videos community, and all those involved in creating and consuming online video more broadly. There's also not a whole lot of time, and so we've had to come to the fairly quick decision that this is of sufficient importance to warrant an exception to the rules.
Copyright on YouTube has, as you'll know, been a hot-topic this year (#TheReactioning), and the generously-speaking less-than-ideal state it finds itself in can be traced back to the issues with the DMCA itself:
With the current DMCA rules, copyright holders can censor and takedown practically any online content, just by saying that it infringes their copyright—no court order or oversight required. It's time to bring fair use back to the Internet.
We aren't here to feed YouTube drama: this is far bigger than that. The internet didn't stand for SOPA, and reddit was amongst the many hundreds of major websites which protested it by blacking-out four years ago. Given that this topic is so acutely pertinent to this community, we aren't comfortable ignoring it. It's just not in anyone's interest to do so.
What do I do now?
1. Visit takedownabuse.org, have a read, and submit your comment.
I strongly recommend that you edit or expand upon the default text to make it something more personal; it's far more effective to have varied comments than carbon copies. But if you don't have the time, this is certainly better than nothing.
2. Share the page wherever you can, if you feel inclined to do so.
The volume and quality of the comments are both important. This is a tight deadline, and has been deliberately massively under-publicised. There were just 80-or-so comments before ChannelAwesome made the video linked to above, and now it seems to be >10,000. If you have something to say, now's the time to say it.
Still not sure?
I was about 50/50 on this being a hoax, and so we did our research.
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You can see the official Fight For the Future Twitter feed endorsing it, and you can research that organisation to confirm its legitimacy. (See their work on SOPA, PIPA, and ProtectIP.)
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You can see the regulations.gov page here - From what I can tell, this is where your comments on takedownabuse.org will be sent, just with the added bonus of not crashing the site again.
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Hopefully, an/some representative/s from Fight For the Future will be showing up in the comments at some point to field questions if you have them.
If you have any feedback, you can contact us as always via modmail
Thanks, guys, and have a good day.
Submitted March 31, 2016 at 09:26PM by TheMentalist10 http://ift.tt/1ZOQDAO
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