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| NASA photo |
Even cutting-edge technology from outer space can get snarled by intellectual property issues.
While NASA's photographs
and videos are freely in the public domain, Motherboard reported that videos of the Mars "Curiousity" rover landing which had been posted by NASA on YouTube were removed for
several hours due to erroneous complaints lodged by Scripps Media under the
Digital Millenium Copyright Act ("DMCA").
Automated
software called "copyright bots" perpetually scour YouTube, looking
for videos that contain content that infringe copyrights.
It is not
yet known why the bots erroneously assumed that the Mars landing rover footage
violated Scripps' copyrights, but it is likely that Scripps had previously
copyrighted similar content.
In any
event, the takedowns raise broader questions about the legal propriety (and
prudence) of using wholly automated bots to make decisions about what content
is likely infringing copyright, and what is not.
Typically, a DMCA-takedown demand
requires that a human being certify under penalty of perjury that he possesses
a good faith belief that a particular use is infringing a copyright. Fair use can also play a role.
However,
because of the sheer volume of material available on the Internet, some content
owners have delegated this delicate task to bots, leading to occasional
problems.
A NASA
spokesman reportedly said that these problems have occurred before, and that
the space agency has tried to work with YouTube to avoid them from recurring, but to no avail.
