"Internet's Own Boy" Briefly Knocked Off YouTube With Bogus DMCA Claim 157
An anonymous reader writes "In a bitter irony, a documentary celebrating Aaron Swartz, the late Internet activist who helped create the Creative Commons, has been taken down from YouTube by a misguided copyright claim." From the article: [O]ne of the dark sides of how copyright is enforced on the Internet is that sites that don't actually infringe are sometimes mistakenly swept up in rightsholders' takedown notices, which are frequently automated. Visitors who tried to watch The Internet's Own Boy on YouTube Friday were greeted by the message, "This video is no longer available due to a copyright claim by Remove Your Media LLC," a reference to a company that specializes in sending copyright takedowns in accordance with the law that governs them, the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA). It's not clear who made the claim, but that's not the point—as activists are all too aware, false copyright claims can can knock legitimate content offline.
Pick up that can (Score:5, Interesting)
As long as our methods of content sharing are allowed to operate only by the grace of the major players (i.e. the rich), we will never be free.
Re:Will we ever stop celebrating him? (Score:1, Interesting)
We really should be recognizing him as the clown he was, and recognizing the administration and the cops and the courts as the tyrants the continue to be.
Instead he's been propped up as some sort of tragic hero figure and attached to things that have very little to do with him or the case against him, and thus the important shit (the tyranny) gets lost in the haze.
Re:Will we ever stop celebrating him? (Score:5, Interesting)
No claim can be made about the moment of his decision, it was his own. Clearly no plan had gone into a more peaceful exit via nitrogen or drugs, instead a more brutal immediate method was chosen on the spur of the moment, that moment where the stresses of continuing exceeded the survival instinct. No one is a slave not even to their own life. It is really rather shallow to pick apart someone's demise. The law enforcement agency was clearly to blame purposefully apply as much stress as possible on order to force compliance to their demands, a ludicrously inflated sentence or false admission of fault for a reduced sentence. That pressure succeeded forcing a spur of the moment decision, one that ensures escape.