Updates On Josh Harris and Facebook Censorship

John points out the Boing Boing post about Josh Harris claiming Pseudo.com was really a hoax:

I now acknowledge that Pseudo Programs, Inc., a New York City based Internet television network founded in 1994 and sold from bankruptcy in 2000 was the linchpin of a long form piece of conceptual art. Pseudo burned over $25 million in private and institutional capital over a span of seven years. Pseudo was a fake company.

Woah.

And the conclusion is that Noneck’s facebook updates about his deportation are really PHP serialized data, says Mark:

That text is serialized PHP data. Specifically, it is an array (think of an array as a “group”) of six integers: 672053, 672054, 672056, 672057, 672058, and 672059. No idea what these mean, but as they are more or less in succession, I’d guess that they’re ID numbers for a database table.

Brian is suspicious that there’s anything behind YouTube’s take down of the video:

As for YouTube taking down the video, that has very little to do with whether or not it’s actually infringing. The DMCA requires that YouTube take down anything that anyone claims is a copyright infringement, so long as the claim fits a certain set of criteria. It’s not up to YouTube to decide whether it’s actually infringing; they’re just passing the message along. However, your friend can submit a counter-claim to YouTube, which they have to pass back to the IOC. The IOC can then either ignore the counter-claim, in which case YouTube has to put the video back up, or they can sue your friend, in which case a court decides whether infringement took place.

Let me just reiterate what I said — I’m not really placing any blame on YouTube. I understand how take down notices work, but Brian also provided YouTube’s policy here. What I was blogging about, and I should have been more clear about this, is the IOC’s reasons for sending such a take down notice, not YouTube’s reasons for obliging. From my original post:

My feeling is that the IOC likes to squash Tibet-related videos involving the IOC’s logo. Their dubious DMCA take down notice is a clear example of a corporation using copyright to stifle free speech.

So again, I’m questioning the IOC’s actions for doing this, not YouTube’s.

Apparently the video seems to be back up? I can’t find any evidence for this.

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