15-Year-Old Scams YouTube 106
SurturZ writes "A fifteen year old from Perth, Australia, posed as an employee of the Australian Broadcasting Commission, demanding that YouTube remove hundreds of video clips of 'The Chasers War on Everything.' The amusing part is that The Chaser is a comedy company well known to perpetrate exactly this sort of prank."
Re:They do? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:They do? (Score:3, Insightful)
And why would an Australian minor care about penalty of perjury of a US court?
Or have you missed the part where this points out the silliness of DMCA requests from international interests?
Re:They do? Yes -- it's public broadcasting (Score:5, Insightful)
That's simply because the commercial television media here doesn't have much as of a budget for news and tends to take everything in the press releases on trust.
Re:Seems pretty funny to me (Score:3, Insightful)
Interesting idea. Illegal as hell, but very interesting.
Good Response.. (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Seems pretty funny to me (Score:2, Insightful)
Or what if it specifically didn't target certain types of videos/songs? A Christian organization could write a virus that would send take down requests for Islamic, Jewish, and Atheistic files, for example. Likewise, Sony could include it in their next root kit and have all of their competitors' fan sites and music video uploads removed.
Re:They do? (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm confused... why would he care if he can't get a visa to visit a country he probably has no interest in visiting?
"Scams"? Shouldn't that be "pranks"? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:"Scams"? Shouldn't that be "pranks"? (Score:3, Insightful)
It was silly and he shouldn't have done it,
I disagree, he should have done it, I'm glad he did, and I only wish I'd have thought of it first. Though nobody seems to have thought to ask him why he sent the fake take-down notice, I suspect he did it to help underscore how truly ridiculous our society's behavior has been become regarding copyrights. You have this handful of enormous corporations who want to own and tightly control all of the world's content. They throw money at lawmakers who then pass really stupid laws that substantially reduce our freedoms in a lot of ways and then send threatening letters and file lawsuits against ordinary people who didn't think they were doing anything particularly wrong.
This kid single-handedly demonstrated to the world how ridiculously easy it is for absolutely anyone to get content removed from public content-sharing services, especially when they don't actually own the content in question.
But what do we get from the media? "Oh, it was just some dumb kid trying to scam YouTube."
Makes me sick.
"Piracy?" (Score:3, Insightful)
Gotta point out that if the legal copyright owner gives permission for free use of its material, it's got nothing to do with "piracy."
It actually creeps me out a little whenever I see "pirating" used as a general term for "downloading something for free." That's only true if all media is locked up and restricted... and we're not there quite yet.