It seem you cant trust big media groups and their associated "tin-pot" collection agencies not to falsely claim revenues they are not entitled to, as this report makes clear.
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20111213/03334517064/big-entertainment-companies-issuing-wrongful-youtube-claims-public-domain-works.shtmlAs Congress is debating SOPA, it seems worth taking a look at how copyright holders are already abusing existing copyright law to take down content they have absolutely no right to. Cory Doctorow has a column concerning how the "real pirates" of YouTube may be the big entertainment companies, who have been using YouTube's ContentID system (not the DMCA) to "claim" a ton of public domain works:
There are two issues here. One is the general over-claiming of material by others. That's generally known as copyfraud and should be punishable, but rarely is. The second, perhaps bigger, point is how this ContentID system -- the kind of pre-monitoring system that the entertainment industry has been trying to foist on every user-generated-content site for the past few years -- isn't always so benign. It can clearly catch perfectly legitimate things, and that's a problem if we're trying to encourage the free flow of information.
But, of course, nothing gets done to fix any of this because, as Cory notes, "there is no organized lobby for the public domain."
The report is here ..
https://public.resource.org/ntis.gov/contentid.pdf.. and makes shocking reading to those like myself who simply want the big media organisations to honour the law regarding copyright expiration, its hard to convince folks to play fair and not share copyrighted material when some companies are building a whole business model out of stealing from the public by making false claims of ownership over a copyright expired work,why don't we send such folks to prison for a year as the movie industry suggest is the way ahead for move cammers ?
