If you go watch my Hitler video on YouTube, you will now see an annotation stating that I have waived all copyright to it, with the help of Creative Commons‘ CC0 language. It is now in the public domain.

That doesn’t mean anyone can just go around claiming ownership of it though. It means that nobody owns it. It belongs to everybody now. Go do whatever you want with it. I’d appreciate it if you give me credit for it, but that’s by no means required.

Anyway, to make this absolutely, positively clear:

There. Enjoy your gift, world. Merry Kwanzaa or whatever.

One the most enduring (and consistently entertaining) Internet memes of the past few years has been remixes of the bunker scene from the German film, The Downfall: Hitler and the End of the Third Reich (aka Der Untergang). [...] In a depressing twist, these remixes are reportedly disappearing from YouTube, thanks to Constantin Film (the movie’s producer and distributor) and YouTube’s censorship-friendly automated filtering system, Content I.D. Because the Content I.D. filter permits a copyright owner to disable any video that contains its copyrighted content — whether or not that video contains other elements that make the use a noninfringing fair use — a content owner can take down a broad swath of fair uses with the flick of a switch. It seems that’s exactly what Constantin Film has chosen to do.

Oliver Hirschbiegel, the film’s director, does not condone this. He says, “”Someone sends me the links every time there’s a new one. I think I’ve seen about 145 of them! Many times the lines are so funny, I laugh out loud, and I’m laughing about the scene that I staged myself! You couldn’t get a better compliment as a director. I think it’s only fair if now it’s taken as part of our history, and used for whatever purposes people like.”

You know who else isn’t happy about it? Hitler.

Someone had to do it, so I did:

I know they’ve had closed-captioning and subtitling features for a while, but I never bothered to try it out until now. I suppose if I don’t do the subtitling now, it’ll soon be done for me by Google’s speech recognition robots, and done very badly.

So here’s “Let’s Meet the Lerners” with full closed-captioning. Click the arrow in the control-bar-thingy, then the “CC” button to turn it on. And if anyone reading this is fluent in another language and wants to translate it, download this .srt file, open it in Notepad on Windows or TextEdit on Mac OS X (if you’re savvy enough to use Linux, I probably don’t need to tell you what your text editor is called), and rewrite all of the texty things while leaving the numbers intact. Then send it to me, of course.

Same-sex marriage now violates intellectual property laws too! Who'dve thunk?

Remember that ridiculous anti-gay marriage ad which I made even more ridiculous by replacing the soundtrack with “It’s Raining Men”? Apparently the National Organization for Nomnomnom isn’t too pleased with that sort of behavior. Parody ads left and…well, who am I kidding, they’re all left…have been removed from YouTube because of NOM’s bitching and whining and DMCA takedown notices (Mine hasn’t been touched, probably because the audio confuses the Content ID robots). Included in this crusade against legal and fair use was one for which the creators were recognized as “Homo Heroes” for their brilliance: a group of Reddit readers spliced the word “interracial” in wherever “same-sex” was in the original ad.

NOM has succeeded at infuriating the entire Internet again, but this time it’s personal. If anything spreads faster than a viral YouTube video, it’s a removed YouTube video. Congratulations, National Organization for Marriage, now both gay people and copyright reformers hate you. Now those two groups will converge, and you will face butt pirates.

Sorry, I had to.

UPDATE: YouTube is apparently giving NOM preferential treatment in their own takedown notice predicament with Perez Hilton. It seems highly unlike Google to be supportive of their cause, so I’m gonna chalk this one up to…something else. I don’t know what.

As a result, your video is blocked everywhere except in these locations:
American Samoa, Australia, Brazil, Canada, Christmas Island, Cocos (Keeling) Islands, Cuba, Fiji, France, Germany, Guam, Heard Island and McDonald Islands, India, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Japan, Kiribati, Mexico, Nauru, Netherlands, New Zealand, Niue, Norfolk Island, Northern Mariana Islands, Papua New Guinea, Puerto Rico, Solomon Islands, South Korea, Spain, Tokelau, Tonga, Tuvalu, United Kingdom, United States, United States Virgin Islands, Vanuatu

So, wait, where is it blocked, then? Most of the countries I’m not seeing on there don’t have their own versions of YouTube. Um…China? Is it blocked in China? Oh, no, that’s all of YouTube, sorry.

I’m very confused. Oh well. I’d imagine that it’s still accessible everywhere regardless, now that I submitted the fair use dispute. This is the third time I’ve had to do that, and it’s kind of annoying. Why can’t I just submit the fair use claim when I upload the video? I know it’s got copyrighted music, I state that in the description, so let’s just cut to the chase, shall we?

But Zacqary! There have been lots of tools that let you download YouTube videos for years!

That’s a valid point, Helvetica Bold 10.5 Dark Orchid, but all of those have required you not only to download an extra program or Firefox extension, but they grab the crappy, compressed Flash Video version that you’d see anyway on YouTube. Now, not only do you click a little link below the video, but you also get to download it in H.264 format! That’s the same encoding that they use on Blu-Ray. BLU-RAY! (Though, granted, the YouTube download has a lower resolution and bitrate than a Blu-Ray, but seriously, it’s an improvement)

I grabbed one of the Obama videos to compare, and yes, it’s quite nice:

H.264 is better than standard YouTube FLV

If you view that full size, you can see that the downloaded video has better contrast and is a lot less fuzzy. Keep in mind, though, that it downloads at 480×270; I resized it to 640×360 so it would be the same size as the video on YouTube. But the YouTube video is probably scaled up too.

Sadly, it isn’t the same quality as YouTube HD:

The download is still lower res than HD, unfortunately.

Again, I scaled the download up. At this level of scaling you start to see where the downloaded copy loses detail. Though the contrast still looks better…maybe that’s Firefox’s fault?

Now, this is still only available for Obama’s channel, but in the coming weeks, Google claims that everyone will have the option to enable their videos to be downloaded. Personally, for the sake of the common Internet user, I’m hoping that it’s an opt-out system. That way the only reason someone would have to stop being lazy and edit their videos is if they want to be an asshole or a corporation.

Speaking of which, when do I get to replace my old videos with HD versions? They’re all ready to upload as soon as you let me, Google.

[Source: Ars Technica]

This actually isn’t new, just a new option for users hit by an increasingly rabid crackdown by Google’s Video Identification robots. A video that I posted of footage I took at Anthrocon was taken down automatically just because I happened to synchronize the footage with a song that is copyrighted by a gigantic corporation. I was given the option to replace the audio with a different song, which would have killed all my hard work in Final Cut, or I could dispute the claim, either because it was an incorrect match (which it wasn’t) or because it was Fair Use (which it was).

I don’t love YouTube’s handling of Fair Use, though legally the burden is upon the Fair User to justify it, so I suppose taking your video down before allowing you to defend the use is appropriate. That’s how I handled my video, explaining to YouTube’s input box that my video was non-commercial and did not prevent the copyright holder from making a profit. Submitting that dispute got my video replaced quite punctually, but when I clicked that Submit button, I saw a single line that told the story of who the true villain is here: “Your claim has been submitted to WMG.” Warner Music Group.

Now, technically, the audio muting was Google’s, not Warner’s idea. Of course it was, because Google is behind the engineering of their site; Warner’s idea was to threaten Google with lawsuits if they didn’t piss off the entire Internet in some way, shape, or form simply because Google (rightfully) didn’t want to give Warner more money than they deserve.

So is Google being cowardly here for not standing up in defense of 17 U.S.C. § 107? Yes, they certainly are, and while I’m sure they don’t want to risk a big legal case in this economy, it would be really nice if they’d use some of their money to uphold the rights of their users under the law. But no company bigger than Psystar has ever concerned themselves with trying to get copyright law interpreted sanely, so Google’s cowardice here isn’t entirely unprecedented.

And while I still say shame on you, Google, since I figured “don’t be evil” implied “don’t be a pussy” too, I’m going to stand by YouTube as best I can here. Instead I will turn my fires of hatred to Warner, because if they’re really that concerned with all the money they’re not losing, perhaps they should reform their business model to sell something people might actually want to pay for.

There’s still something I find odd, though. Remember that video that YouTube took down, and how my dispute was submitted to “WMG”? Well, take a look at it and listen. Here’s the Vimeo version just in case Warner DDoS’s YouTube or something:

That music? You hear that? That’s “Welcome To The Jungle” by Guns N’ Roses. Guns N’ Roses is signed to Geffen Records, which is owned by Universal Music Group. I’m sure Universal is probably slamming YouTube as well, but…

Why was my claim about a Universal Music Group song sent to Warner??????