Even with my brothers involvement, I haven't really touted what's going on Tibet and with the controversy with this year's Olympics. Even though one my favorite bands (Radiohead) came on stage the other night with a their instruments draped with Tibetan flags after they had a professor from Columbia talk to us for about half an hour about what's going on, even though I know the issues, I still have been silent. At least here.

I do talk about things in public, to strangers, to coworkers, to family members, there is a place in my life for it. I don't think Roborooter is a good place though. I do however think that Roborooter is a place to talk about abusive copyright practices.

Take down notices are becoming a problem. A big problem. It started with a way to keep people from posting copyrighted materials on their personal servers. Send the server a notice and they take the content down. Sort it out later. No big deal.

When that started there was no way to know, to fathom, that every single person's computer could host content. At the time they were very effective. These days content makers owners who wish to protect their copyrights have to send out thousands of them to keep up with things like youtube and myspace (which is evil and must be destroyed) and the people that run content sites get flooded and instead of assessing what is valid and what is not they cover their asses and remove everything.

This means if I don't like your work, it is very very easy for me to have it removed temporarily and maybe even permanently regardless if I have cause or not. With the nature of the internet if you get removed from the net while you're popular you've lost out incredibly.

This leads me into a video created by the Students for a Free Tibet about their NYC Chinese Consulate Projection Action, which was removed from youtube because the IOC (International Olympic Comity) said it violated their copyrights. It looks like fair use to me, but even so, you can't watch it right now on youtube.

Vimeo on the other hand, has not responded the same way. Vimeo also has nicer higher quality videos that we can all enjoy.

NYC Chinese Consulate Projection Action 08.07.08 from Students for a Free Tibet on Vimeo. Download mp4

I'll end with a link to the EFF's No Downtime For Free Speech campaign. Those guys owe me a hat.

-Francis