Soulja Boy Now Officially Sending Takedown Notices

Written by

Fred

A story told in three videos:

1. “Original” Soulja Boy Video **

2. Students for Free Culture board member and friend Kevin Driscoll teaching ROLFcon nerds how to do SouljaBoy:

3. Kevin responding to his Soulja Boy takedown notice:

It seems that Kevin’s video has become the victim of YouTube’s auto-takedown robots. Good thing he posted it to Blip.tv as well. More info on the ROFLcon blog.

**Soulja Boy’s YouTube channel doesn’t allow me to embed his video into this blog, and despite my halfhearted attempts at circumventing this “feature” I wasn’t able to post it with the others. I can’t believe I’m arguing for the right to embed a video, or even that it would be possible to deny me the right to do so, but this is what happens when we rely on proprietary video codecs like Flash.

Comments

5 responses to “Soulja Boy Now Officially Sending Takedown Notices”

  1. Kevin Avatar
    Kevin

    Increasing numbers of publishers are denying the opportunity to embed.
    I believe this has to do with the revenue-sharing partnerships that
    YouTube offers its most popular channels. Embeds don’t expose the big
    ads in the right-hand column.

    The downside is that dozens of blog posts around the web are broken.
    YouTube reports “This video is no longer available” instead of the
    accurate message, “This video’s owner does not permit embedding.”
    Furthermore, bookmarklet-driven tools like Tumblr don’t detect whether
    or not a YT vid is embeddable so your RSS feeds will continue to be
    plagued by misleading error messages.

    For better or worse, YouTube is an empire in decline.

    We lost Napster. We lost Oink. Is YT the next great digital library to go?

  2. Crank Dat ROFLCon Taken Down on YouTube | David Fisher : What is Noise Blog

    […] Other bloggers have picked this up too. Fred Benenson’s blog had a good writeup and Rebecca Corliss also wrote about it. I sent a YouTube message to Soulja Boy […]

  3. Michael Sander Avatar
    Michael Sander

    Hey Fred,
    I think the H.264 video code used by flash players is actually open (though it is not 100% sure how free, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H.264#Patent_licensing). The real problem is flash’s proprietary interface to the codec. Hopefully red5 moves in this direction.

  4. Fred Benenson’s Blog » Blog Archive » The RIAA’s Loss

    […] But there is already evidence of ISPs acting in haste to dismantle legal file sharing outfits. TorrentFreak has a story about an open source software tracker having their service revoked by their ISP because they were accused of hosting an illegal torrent of the game Command and Conquer. YouTube already engages in auto-take-downs of videos that are supposedly infringing. […]

  5. Dean Avatar
    Dean

    Michael,

    Nope h.264 is a patent encumbered codec. It’s not free in most senses of the word. Ogg Theora and Dirac are the only serious open codecs that I know of (for video over the web).

    —Dean

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