Hyphen, the god of marriage
Earlier, I was musing over the debacle of the live streaming of the Hugo Awards ceremony - the service provider, ustream, cut off the webcast part way through Neil Gaiman's acceptance speech for alleged "copyright violations", apparently because their automated systems for trapping copyright violations were triggered by the video clips provided by
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Yes, because thousands of people watch the Hugos on the off chance that Neil Gaiman would win. (Ok, given his competition in the category, it was a good chance that he would win, but still - it's a fucking Oscar speech, not a Gaiman-specific event like a valectditorian speech).
Even at the time when we were all tweeting up in arms about it, there weren't enough viewers to make the ustream fail trend, and it certainly wasn't news anywhere with enough of a profile for ustream to notice that they pissed off the 100-200 people or so who were trying to watch.
Show me Gaiman posting about how mean nast ustream messed up his speech, and II'll, no, I still won't believe that this is anywhere near enough traction to cause ustream to be "not long for this world".
Even the wider copyright issue (that the DCMA take down rules are so biased towards Big Media that youtube and ustream use automated tools just to keep from going under) hasn't been taken up because of it.
And it is a youtube issue too - there are regularly news stories about how:
1) youtube video goes viral
2) late night show (e.g. david letterman) talks about the video, including re-posting it to their youtube feed
3)youtube automated bots mark the original video as a copyright infringement because it was on tv
And yet youtube remains in business even when talking about videos that go viral (which means millions of hits, not a handful of truly die-hard Gaiman fans)
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On checking it out, the very small handful of angry tweeters was enough to cause the CEO of ustream to post an apology of sorts.
And io9 has picked up the larger story (that automated copyright bots are crude tools that - as happened on Sunday - censor free speech)
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