The Daily Background

The above video from Tehran is remarkable for two reasons. The first reason is pretty obvious: it shows Iranian protesters vastly outnumbering hardliner government stormtroopers and forcing them to retreat on Saturday June 20th, a day that Ayatolla Khamenei proclaimed that no protests would be tolerated.

The second reason that this video is somewhat remarkable is the story behind what it took for you to be able to see this video. It was originally filmed, likely on a cell phone, in Tehran, and digitally smuggled out of the country, like so many other hundreds of videos showing government oppression are now seeping out. That does not make it unique. BBC Persian found the video online, aired it, and also uploaded it to their YouTube account here.

The BBC has, stupidly, chosen to prevent us from embedding their YouTube videos, essentially restricting their own content from the larger traffic that it would enjoy should it be allowed to go viral and get embedded in blogs and the like. So I downloaded the video and uploaded it to my YouTube account (my embed is what you see above). It’s stupid that I should even have to take this step to allow this video to be seen by others, but what happened next is what is even stupider.

Upon uploading it, I got a notice on the video saying that YouTube’s automatic content detection system has flagged my video for infringing the BBC’s copyright:

Hence, my video was automatically quarantined with nobody allowed to see it. Through YouTube’s automated system, the BBC was literally claiming that I had infringed their copyright– when they didn’t even own the copyright to the video themselves that they were claiming copyright over!

The truth is, I have exactly as much right to upload the video as the Beeb did: we were both uploading it under the fair use doctrine.

This is an instance where the old rules of copyright have collided with the new realities that technology brings, and suddenly the old rules don’t apply. The Islamic Regime has effectively put all foreign journalists under house arrest and some say they have arrested domestic journalists by the dozens. Iranian opposition leaders and citizen journalists (the people running around with their cell phone cameras making these videos and taking these pictures) have repeatedly asked internet users all over the world to syndicate their content wherever possible. The BBC has no right to deny to me a fair use privilege that they themselves have taken advantage of.

Anyway, the video is now under review, and because I submitted a challenge to the automated copyright takedown notice, it has been temporarily reinstated so you should be able to watch it. I’ll post updates if the situation changes and the BBC wants to press forward with taking it down permanently.

For now, I’ll end this post on a quote from the man who probably won Iran’s recent fraudulent election, Mir Hossein Mousavi:

“Today you are the media, it is your duty to report and keep the hope alive.”

Update: Looks like I’m not the only one to have this happen to one of their Youtube videos.

Filed under: Z-TDB Blog