15-Year-Old Scams YouTube

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?

[catxk]

I can see why you think that part is interesting, then again, it's a public service company so any policy other than "get our content out there on as many platforms as possible" would be absurd. It's the tax payers who pay for it, thus everything produced under the ABC banner should be (and is it seems) public domain by definition. On a sidenote: As I said, any other policy would be absurd. Sweden's SVT currently is absurd.

Re:They do?

[Anonymous Coward]

"You mean they lie about whether they're authorised to act on behalf of copyright holders _under penalty of perjury_?"

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

[dbIII]

Strangely enough, the Howard government dismisses it for exactly that reason, and prefers to use the commercial media to get their spin out.

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

[ScrewMaster]

Not only is it brilliant, but in essence it is a form of automated civil disobedience.

Interesting idea. Illegal as hell, but very interesting.

Good Response..

[qbproger]

The head of the comedy department didn't fly off the handle saying we're suing the kid. The police didn't show up at his door to take them away in hand cuffs. There response was "Everyone does dumb stuff when they're 15." What happened to that attitude in America?

Re:Seems pretty funny to me

[bhiestand]

Exactly. I wouldn't want to be caught writing such a program, but if it became widely spread it could certainly influence media conglomerates like Google and MySpace to use their weight to get these laws changed...

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?

[FireFury03]

or if he ends up on a list that guarantees that he can never get a visa.

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"?

[Venerable Vegetable]

To say he scammed them seems a bit harsh. He didn't do this for any personal gain, which is implied when you call it a scam. It was silly and he shouldn't have done it, but it wasn't as serious as a scam. No harm done, except maybe a little time lost and some advertisment money. On the other hand, Youtube has learned a lesson.

Re:"Scams"? Shouldn't that be "pranks"?

[Eil]

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?"

[violet16]

So it dosn't seem like The Chaser are against piracy, only the ABC.

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.