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CBC Demands Takedown of Net Libel Story Video

A commenter notes that the CBC has demanded that YouTube remove the video of its excellent story on Internet libel.  The CBC is obviously within its rights to do so, yet it seems so unnecessary given that there was several weeks of work by the reporter, hours of time volunteered by those interviewed, a publicly-funded broadcaster that should be doing all it can to increase access (the video does not appear to be on the cbc.ca site Update: John Bowman of the CBC notes in the comments that the video is available on the cbc.ca site), and a non-commercial use of a video that only served to educate more people about the issue.  Yet the CBC would seemingly prefer that it fully exercise its copyright rights rather than ensuring that the public continue to have access to the report.

7 Comments

  1. Mark Francis says:

    A Google search limited to YouTube found some 16,000 instances of CBC video. Not all are, of course, but there must be thousands.

    The CBC keeps a presence there, but that accounts for a minority of the videos.

    The policy, as I found out, is that the CBC doesn’t enforce its rights wrt news broadcasts, so it seemed safe to post. Unfortunately, the CBC classified this piece as a ‘minidoc’, and minidocs rebroadcast rights are a lucrative money maker for the CBC, so those rights they do enforce.

  2. Associate Producer, CBCNews.ca
    The video does appear on the CBC website. I know, I put it up on the video player on the news page:

    [ link ]

    Unfortunately, CBC videos aren\’t currently as easy to search for and link to as YouTube videos.

  3. kempton.ideasRevolution.com
    Hi John Bowman (and CBCnews.ca),

    Thanks for responding and posting the link here. Good to hear that you realize the CBC videos aren’t currently easily found. I hope the CBC is doing something about it. And the fact that video can’t be embeded in our own website also reduce the number of views of the stories.

    As an example, I recently blogged about the wonderful story of Roots of Empathy (a re-run of a mini-doc at The National)
    [ link ]
    I had to jump through hoops to find the story video. The CBC search function in CBC was pretty useless in finding the video.

  4. Not exactly trademark law
    Copyright is not exactly trademark law. Failure to chase down a non-commercial infringer does nothing to affect the validity of the copyright for commercial purposes.

    Something doesn’t smell right here.

  5. Albert Organzes says:

    selective enforcement is taking a side
    “A Google search limited to YouTube found some 16,000 instances of CBC video. Not all are, of course, but there must be thousands. ”

    “Something doesn’t smell right here.”

    Darn right. Very selective copyright enforcement on demand of one party who is vitally interested in having the material suppressed from public view (and refused to participate in the piece as an interviewee)? With the effect of making the piece invisible and unlinked to all the supplementary material on the web? And crippling his opponents’ fundraising to resist his repeated attacks?

    Complying with such “requests” constitutes systematic favouritism for the person requesting this “policy” be enforced.

    Surely cutting the piece back to the length of a normal news item would satisfy any commercial considerations that might apply to a “mini-doc”?

    Unless it’s on YouTube, no one will see it. CBC is using crap tools, as usual. They need to use semantic mediawiki or something like that which maximizes search engine hits organically.

    And they need to hang up when spin doctors and liars call them to demand they do things.

  6. The video is also available on the National’s blog: [ link ]

  7. Pierre-Etienne Paradis says:

    Is there a use for Crown copyright
    It is unfortunate that the CBC uses its Crown copyright privileges to prevent the general public to do what it is entitled to do under the Fair Dealing provisions, i.e. research, comment, news reporting.

    This great piece of journalism stirs up public debate on an important issue, and it’s obvious to me that most people who watch this video don’t do it for entertainment purposes. Shame on CBC lawyers for thinking otherwise (and shame on CBC technology advisors for their use of crap proprietary formats!)