Legal
19-year-old Commits Suicide on Justin.tv
In a striking display of the power of live video, Abraham K. Biggs committed suicide on Wednesday while broadcasting himself on video site Justin.tv. As we understand it from various forum posts, the 19-year-old Floridian was apparently egged on by commenters on Justin.tv and fellow forum users on bodybuilding.com. Biggs overdosed on pills while on camera and appeared to be breathing for hours until watchers realized he might be serious, at which point they alerted the police. The video kept running until police and EMTs broke Biggs’ door down and blocked the camera’s view.
We confirmed Biggs’ death with the Broward County medical examiner. The Justin.tv video and many of the forum posts have been taken down.
When asked about the broadcast via email, Justin.tv CEO Michael Seibel said:
As for the broadcaster incident last night, we don’t comment on individual videos, however, our policy prohibits inappropriate content on Justin.tv. We rely on the community to flag videos that they feel are objectionable. Once a video is flagged, it is reviewed and quickly removed from the system if it violates our Terms of Use.
WGA: Producers Not Paying for New Media
It’s like we jumped in the wayback machine and landed smack dab in November 2007. The Writers Guild of America (WGA) said yesterday that big media companies weren’t honoring the contract that ended last year’s 100-day writer’s strike by failing to pay residuals for work used in new media. The WGA West has filed for arbitration against the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP) for payment of those residuals.
The WGA appears to have two main beefs with the AMPTP over electronic sell-through of content and streaming of television shows. The WGA says that its agreement with the AMPTP covers feature films produced after July 1, 1971 and TV shows produced after 1977. According to the WGA, the studios are reneging and saying only programs created after Feb. 13, 2008 are covered.
If that wasn’t enough, the WGA says that TV shows are being streamed online for longer than the 17-day residual-free grace period specified in the contract, but writers have received no payments.
Ugh. Don’t forget that the Screen Actors Guild is still working without a contract, and the economy is, shall we say, quite sucky right now — and last year’s strike cost the Los Angeles economy $2 billion. A second strike in as many years may not engender the same level of sympathy as it did last time around and could be even more devastating to the local economy.
Vid-Biz: Vudu, Bright House, TV Ads
Vudu Debuts New High-End Box; the XL2 Internet movie player is designed for home theater installation, lets users download and watch movies in Vudu’s high-def HDX format; can going high end save the troubled set-top company? (emailed release)
Bright House Launches Road Runner Video Store; online VOD site will offer movies for rent or purchase from TV networks and movie studios, similar to Comcast’s Fancast site. (CED)
eMarketer: U.S. TV Ad Spending to Decline in 2009; research company says the ad spend will drop 4.2 percent next year to $66.9 billion, online video ad spending as a percent of TV ad spending to grow from less than 1 percent this year to 1.7 percent in 2010. (eMarketer)
DivX Sues Yahoo Over Toolbars; lawsuit comes after Yahoo backed out of a two-year agreement; DivX has not yet removed the toolbar option from its downloads. (Rueters with additional reporting by NewTeeVee)
Sanctuary Picked Up for Second Season; former web series finds success on Sci-Fi Channel, moves on to sophomore outing. (Hero Complex Blog)
Xbox Adds Magnolia Pictures to its Marketplace; films like The Host and The World’s Fastest Indian added to the lineup of movies offered. (The Hollywood Reporter)
Theatrical Movie Revenues Up, Attendance Down; at $8.148 billion, the 2008 box office tally has already surpassed 2007 — but attendance is down 3.56 percent. (Deadline Hollywood Daily)
YouTube Filters 75-80 Percent Accurate: NBCU Exec
It’s been a year since Google implemented YouTube’s video filtering in order to stop the upload of unauthorized clips and eventually monetize its users’ uploads. The folks over at ZDNet decided to cover the anniversary with a special 15-page report called The YouTube File (PDF available for registered users only), in which the system receives a largely sympathetic review from NBC Universal Chief Counsel Rick Cotton. The report has Cotton on record with the assessment that YouTube’s filters are “improving month by month” and now catch some 75-80 percent of all illegal uploads.
Others, however, disagree, among them the vendor of a competing filtering solution that puts the number at closer to 3 percent. Google’s response is that some of those videos may have been legitimate copies that were authorized by content owners, and viewing some of the disputed clips suggests that may in fact be the case.
Vid-Biz: Google, TV Ads, Network DVR
Google Employees Could Stand Trial in Italy; charges of defamation and failure to exercise control over personal data expected to be brought against four employees in relation to a clip posted to Google Video of a disabled teen being bullied. (PC World)
Study: TV Ads Should Stick Logos in the Middle of the Screen; Boston College says this helps create brand retention even in the face of fast-forwarding. (eMarketer)
Network DVR Enters Next Phase of Legal Fight; The Copyright Alliance has filed an amicus brief with the Supreme Court oppsoing the set-top box-less DVR system Cablevision has in the works. (DSLReports)
Canwest Gets Streaming Rights to FOX Shows; Canadian broadcaster to stream full-length episodes of Bones, 24, Family Guy and more. (Variety)
Mobile Video Infrastructure Market to Grow; despite downturn, research firm In-Stat predicts the market will reach $291 million in 2012. (emailed release)
RealDVD Free Trial Really Over
Real has posted an open letter alerting those people who downloaded RealDVD that the legally challenged DVD copying software will no longer work after the 30-day free trial. Further, such people will not be able to upgrade to the full version — at least not yet.
RealDVD ran afoul of the law studios almost the instant it was released, with its DVD copying capabilities raising the ire of Hollywood. Lawsuits and counterlawsuits were immediately filed, resulting in a federal court suspending distribution of the software.
Real wants you to know that it’s not their fault; rather, it wants you to blame those rotten Hollywood studios who have challenged the legality of Real’s approach to storing DVD content on a hard drives. From the open letter Real posted on its site:
You shouldn’t be caught in the middle, and we apologize that you are. As a thank you for your patience we will upgrade your trial to a fully licensed copy, free of charge, if we are legally allowed to resume distribution of RealDVD.
In terms of that upgrade, Real wants you to keep the trial software you downloaded on your computer until the company is legally allowed to resume its distribution — which won’t happen any time soon. It doesn’t expect the court to make a ruling until “the first part” of next year, and even then, if the history of Hollywood vs. technology is any indication, it’s not looking good for the software.
YouTube Wants BayTSP’s Viacom Records
YouTube, in its ongoing attempt to defend itself against Viacom’s billion-dollar copyright infringement lawsuit, on Oct. 17 asked a court to help it obtain documents from Viacom’s hired copyright enforcers at BayTSP.
We heard about the court filing through a news story on MarketWatch and were able to pull it up for your perusing here (PDF). YouTube alleges that examining BayTSP records will show that YouTube acted promptly and properly on all copyright takedown notices and that Viacom wasn’t as innocent as its lawsuit would suggest. It’s all a little whiny and perhaps even nit-picky, but I guess if you were being sued for that much money you’d be mired in the details, too.
YouTube says it’s been after BayTSP for nine months to get it to turn over these documents, but after many calls, letters and excuses it wants the court to get involved. The documents, according to YouTube, will ultimately help prove its case, that the copyright holder, rather than the video host, is best equipped to figure out whether a video infringes copyright.
Some of the main points YouTube makes are listed below: Read more of this story
YouTube Changes Flagging for Kids Fighting
Kids posting videos of fights they get into is nothing new to YouTube, but evidently the problem has gotten to the point where the video sharing site is changing its flagging language to try and stem the tide. The YouTube Blog has a post up this morning saying that it has renamed the flag category “minors fighting” as “youth violence.” From that post:
The “minors fighting” flag simply wasn’t being used enough, yet the number of these kinds of videos has been increasing. Now you can more easily flag violent videos that include underage people, and we’ll take it from there.
Evidently, YouTube’s takedown measures weren’t working, as the company admits the number of these fight videos is on the rise.
Online video of kids fighting grabbed headlines earlier this year when eight teenagers lured another girl into a home, videotaped her brutal beating and planned to post it to YouTube.
It’s a tough situation for the video site. YouTube co-founder Steve Chen has said that he prefers having the community police video content rather than the company itself to maintain the “fabric” of the service. And this YouTube Blog post reinforces that, calling users its “first line of defense” and reiterating that with more than 13 hours of video uploaded every minute to the service, it just can’t keep up.
But will a simple change of wording drastically change the number of videos flagged? Seems unlikely. So what do you think YouTube should do? Increase police activity on a corporate level, or continue to let users monitor the site?
Copyright Lawsuit Against PornoTube Withdrawn
The owners of the X-rated YouTube clone PornoTube.com won’t have to bare it all in court, after all: Porn powerhouse Vivid dropped its copyright infringement lawsuit against PornoTube owner Data Conversions Inc., also known as the Adult Entertainment Broadcasting Network (AEBN), earlier this week.
Vivid sued AEBN back in December of 2007, alleging that PornoTube distributed at least 50 scenes from Vivid’s porn movies without any license to do so. One of the movies mentioned in the original complaint was the sex tape of network TV starlet and B-list personality Kim Kardashian. These movies have all disappeared from the site since then. In fact, users have reported that PornoTube has been removing countless clips in recent days, hinting at an out-of-court agreement. Vivid told us that it has “no comment at this time” on any arrangement between the two companies.
Could McCain’s Fury Ignite DMCA Revisions?
Two non-profit advocacy groups are proposing changes to the way Congress and web hosts handle copyright claims. The suggestions come less than a week after the the McCain presidential campaign found itself on the wrong side of a takedown notice.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation today made a reasonable attempt to resolve a conflict between YouTube, political campaigns, television networks, and the law, all of which are at odds over online video spots made by the McCain and Obama campaigns that use snippets of TV news broadcasts.
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