Silencing Legal Insurrection at YouTube
As a contributor to the Legal Insurrection blog, I have a special interest in the attempt that’s presently going on to silence Legal Insurrection from reporting through YouTube videos on hearings connected with the BDS movement. Here’s the story as reported by Professor William Jacobson, the head of LI:
YouTube took down Legal Insurrection’s Channel without any prior notice based on “multiple third-party claims of copyright infringement,” but we never received any claims of infringement.
We have lost hundreds of videos, including a lot of original content on important news subjects. You now will see disabled videos in hundreds of our posts…
[The LI YouTube account was then re-instated.]
UPDATE 1-13-2017 9:50 a.m. ”” I just received notice from YouTube that the copyright claims were filed by the Modern Language Association based on excerpts of audio of pro- and anti-Israel speakers at the MLA Annual Meeting we reported on in this post, Massive DEFEAT for BDS at Modern Language Association.
We intend to fight this both at the YouTube and legal level. It is highly questionable that MLA owns the copyright for oral presentations at the Annual Meeting, and even if it did, the limited excerpts we used from the nearly 2-hour video posted by MLA on YouTube are well-within fair use. What I think is really going on here is that anti-Israel activists at MLA complained to MLA that MLA had posted the audio on YouTube. MLA took down its own 2-hour video and now seeks to silence our reporting.
I will certainly be following this.
Everything is political to leftists. Non-political does NOT exist.
I think I read earlier this morning that YouTube had reversed the ban?
Yeah. Confirmed: just did a search on Legal Insurrection on YT and watched a short vid’ in their library.
…so some things are back up, at least. (01:48P Pacific)
The MLA is seriously leftist. So the defeat of a pro-BDS motion there is remarkable. Maybe some of the academics re-discovered their Jewishness. Or a sense of fair-mindedness. Just in time.
Where is the ACLU when the 1st Amendment is under assault?
Parker,
The ACLU decided a couple years ago, with gay marriage, that right wingers do not deserve to be protected by the freedom of religion part of the first amendment. It would be reasonable to assume they don’t think right wingers deserve to be protected by the freedom of speech/press portions either.
KRB
I love this line from LI’s request to reinstate the videos:
“Additionally the use will have no affect on the “market” for the original work, which is non-existent.”
THIS IS how you get more Trump.