Last summer MoveOn’s Eli Pariser decided to have a little fun with web video, and with the help of Brave New Films got some folks together to post “Stop the Falsiness,” in part to poke fun at themselves and to also take advantage of Pariser’s being on the Colbert Report to advance their campaign against right-wing news programs. Their video went up on YouTube, and in the first week alone got more than 40,000 views.
But recently, the video was taken down in response to complaints from Viacom (Comedy Central’s parent company) that it violated their copyright by using several snippets of Colbert on his show. So now MoveOn and Brave New Films are suing Viacom, with legal help from free speech watchdogs at the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
Importantly, MoveOn and Brave New Films point out that Viacom is trying to stop the exact same use of snippets of other people’s video that their own comedy programs, like the Colbert Robert and the Daily Show, feast on daily.
“Our clients’ video is an act of free speech and a fair use of ‘Colbert Report’ clips,” said EFF Staff Attorney Corynne McSherry. “Viacom knows this — it’s the same kind of fair use that ‘The Colbert Report’ and ‘The Daily Show’ rely upon every night as they parody other channels’ news coverage.”
Unfortunately, under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), all someone has to do is merely allege copyright infringement and many Internet service providers will cave in. Thus the MoveOn suit raises an important broader issue.
As Pariser said, “Online sites like YouTube have revolutionized political expression and can give the little guy an audience of millions for a political point of view….Copyright owners need to double-check their claims and think about free speech rights before erasing political content from sites like YouTube and misusing the DMCA.”
Hear, hear!