John McCain's
YouTube channel
This week Presidential candidate Sen. John McCain sent a letter to senior executives at YouTube and parent company Google, asking for a "full legal review" of takedown notices submitted against videos posted by political candidates and campaigns.
Statistically, McCain lags behind Sen. Barack Obama in terms of social networking popularity, online buzz and online video views. Rival Obama built a social network, is a frequent Twitter participant, and has even had his campaign speeches mashed up by celebrities on YouTube.
In contrast, many of McCain's ads have been removed from YouTube because of complaints about their use of unlicensed music or news broadcasts.
"YouTube has played a prominent and overwhelmingly positive role in the 2008 election," the McCain campaign stated in its appeal to the video-sharing site. Withdrawing ads for paltry violations of copyright "has already chilled [the] free and uninhibited discourse" that YouTube users enjoy."
YouTube rejected the request, arguing it takes videos down to comply with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). It wrote (pdf):
While we agree with you that the US presidential election-related content is invaluable and worthy of the highest level of protection, there is a lot of other content on our global site that our users around the world find to be equally important.
We try not to favor one category of content on our site over others, and to treat all of our users fairly, regardless of whether they are an individual, a large corporation, or a candidate for public office.
YouTube also suggested that McCain channel his frustration into conceiving improvements to the DMCA takedown process:
On a final note, we hope that as a content uploader you have gained a sense of some of the challenges we face everyday in operating YouTube. We look forward to working with Senator (or President) McCain on ways to combat abuse of the DMCA takedown process on YouTube, including, by way of example, strengthening the fair use doctrine[.]
The decade-old DMCA dictates that a third party can file a notification on copyrighted content on a video-sharing site, like YouTube, and have that video taken down "immediately" for at least 10 days.
The McCain camp, whose ads sometimes make use of unlicensed music snippets or news broadcasts, alleged this material comprises "fewer than 10 seconds of footage" in his ads, and "have no conceivable effect on the market for the allegedly infringed works."
That last statement may be subject to interpretation, depending on where you stand. Last August, the campaign was sued by songwriter Jackson Browne, whose song Running on Empty was used without permission in an Obama-bashing advertisement, Adrants reports.
