The Atheist Blogger

The James Randi Educational Foundation’s YouTube account is back online since being taken down earlier this week. Whilst I may have been wrong about the reasons the JREF account was banned (I proposed that theists had opposed to some of the anti-religious content), the real reasons don’t really make this situation any better. The JREF have written a short news piece on why they were banned.

Our account had been suspended by YouTube due to some copyright complaints on a handful of videos we had uploaded. The videos in question have been removed, the proper hoops have been jumped through, and YouTube restored the account. We are currently going though our inventory to make sure any videos that we even suspect might be in violation are removed. There are 200+ of them, so it’ll take us some time, but we’re on it.

I am still against YouTube’s backwards policy of guilty until proven innocent because in cases such as these, nobody wins. The copyright holder gets the video taken down, good for them, but it’ll soon be uploaded somewhere else. This is a result of useless copyright law, but I won’t go into my anti-copyright stance in detail now. The JREF lose out because they have their entire channel taken offline over a couple of videos. Why couldn’t YouTube simply restrict access to those videos? It seems to me that completely banning a channel filled with over 200 videos of educational material is a very stupid thing to do, especially when only a few videos are breaking “copyright law”. I think YouTube needs to seriously reconsider how it handles copyright violations, or even channel maintenance. Educational channels should have some kind of protection, especially if a single copyright violation (which can be as much as the accidental use of a song) is going to get the entire channel taken down. If this was the CNN channel or Barack Obama’s channel, I somehow think YouTube would have actively tried to contact the owner first, or banned the single video, not everything.

The biggest loser through all this is YouTube itself, which was the subject of numerous articles in the skeptic/atheist blogosphere over the past few days. The fact that good people seem to suffer at the hands of YouTube’s copyright policies has always been the problem with issues of censorship. Whether or not the original motive for censorship was good or not (as with the recent Australian ISP filtering), there are always going to be innocent people who suffer because of it. Censorship is a flawed system that never works because it has to have a benevolent dictator behind it, and YouTube is far from benevolent. It is evident that YouTube needs to rethink it’s policy on dealing with copyright claims, especially when the channel belongs to an otherwise innocent person.

It seems that Expelled is generating a load of publicity recently, and not because of it’s release today. So far, the list of items Expelled has stolen is this:

• “Inner Life of the Cell” made by Harvard professors
• Music from John Lennon
• Music from The Killers

Could breaking web design licenses also be on that list? After a bit of poking around I found that the blog theme used on the Expelled site (http://expelledthemovie.com/blog – I’m not making it a hyperlink for very good reasons) is the same theme I use on my personal blog, albeit very edited.

Editing this theme isn’t against the license it has on it, but is has this very specific line:

A link back to N.Design Studio must be retained in the footer (either modified or unmodified)

The theme in question is GlossyBlue by the N.Design Studio mentioned, and it is a very good theme, being both attractive and XHTML compliant. I have contacted the designer to enquire whether Expelled purchased a license for the theme (which would enable them to remove the link), but considering they didn’t bother to pay for most of the rest of the film content, I really wouldn’t be surprised if they “overlooked” this as well.

On a related note, it seems the Expelled producers are denying making a copy of the animation (the similarities are hopefully enough to be prosecuted). This statement was place on their website:

Editor’s Note: Questions have been raised about the origination of some of the animation used in our movie EXPELLED: No Intelligence Allowed. Claims that we have used any animation in an unauthorized manner are simply false. Premise Media created the animation that illustrates cellular activity used in our film.- The Producers of “EXPELLED: No Intelligence Allowed”