Universal censors news video in Megaupload case, then quietly drops DMCA order (Updated)

I had been planning to leave this story alone for a while, given that it’s not directly about e-books. But Universal made a really dumb move that should remind us all about the dangers of giving the content industry a bigger padlock to slap onto our digital printing presses, whichever medium we use.

Remember that Megaupload music video that Universal slapped with a DMCA takedown? Tom Merritt of the daily news video blog Tech News Today covered the controversy on Monday, including the use of a couple of clips of the Megaupload video in question. By Monday night, Universal had the news episode pulled from YouTube.

Tom tells us he wasn’t informed of the video’s removal until a fan told him on Twitter, and that the episode was promptly restored when he complained using YouTube’s automated dispute process — but Universal followed up with an official DMCA takedown request on Tuesday morning, and the show is currently down. Tom’s filed YouTube’s corresponding DMCA counter-dispute and the video will go back up in 10 days unless Universal decides to go full-on crazy and actually file a lawsuit, but at this point the damage has been done. As Tom says, "In 10 days a daily news show is worthless, so Universal was able to censor this episode of Tech News Today."

At the same time, Megaupload’s founder lodged in court the contract artist will.i.am signed (PDF), proving that it had the right to use his performance. He also stated he had spoken to will.i.am personally and the artist had said that he had never authorized any takedown to be sent on his behalf.

People who have been following the Google Books case may think that it always takes courts months or years to rule on copyright-related matters, but the judge with whom Megaupload filed suit doesn’t seem to be letting any grass grow under her feet:

In a brief order on Wednesday afternoon, Judge Claudia Wilken wrote that she would "defer ruling" on Megaupload’s request for a restraining order until UMG has had an opportunity to respond. But she asked the label to file its response "on or before December 15"—that is, on Thursday.

She didn’t give the company’s lawyers a month or a week to respond. She said “by tomorrow.” (Which was, in fact, today.) I haven’t found any word about whether Universal did in fact file that response, but I do see that it quietly dropped its DMCA complaints against both the original video and the newscast. (Apparently the reason for the takedown involved a case of mistaken identity of one of the singers in the video.) Megaupload can and will still seek damages, however.

Update: UMG did make the Thursday deadline with a filing claiming that 1) the DMCA doesn’t legally allow a court to issue a restraining order to stop someone from filing takedown notices, and 2) the removals of the promotional video from YouTube was done not under the DMCA, but under a private contractual agreement between Universal and YouTube which gives UMG "the right to block or remove user-posted videos through YouTube’s CMS based on a number of contractually specified criteria." And those criteria apparently go beyond just copyright infringement, though since the agreement isn’t public there’s no way to tell what those criteria do include.

Now let’s be fair: Megaupload does seem to exist largely for the trading of pirated files (including e-books). Yes, it’s meant, in theory, to allow trading of any files, including legitimately distributed things like Linux, or content released by its own creators, but in practice it ends up being almost entirely illegitimately-uploaded material because that’s what people these days want to share. The laws as written right now actually give services like that an incentive not to police what gets uploaded to them, because that would mean they lose their DMCA safe harbor (and because having to police them would be so expensive as to drive them right out of business).

That seems to be something SOPA is meant to “fix”, and the “fix” might indeed close down services used for piracy. But it would have a lot of collateral damage, too—even services like YouTube, which currently does the best job it can to filter out unauthorized uploads (and which thus allowed Universal to take down Megaupload’s video and the news video in the first place) could have to shutter.