Dear Sirs,

Re:  Spurious Copyright Claim
YouTube Account:  http://www.youtube.com/user/alawson911

I have just received the following notice:

We have disabled the following material as a result of a third-party notification from James Allan Khan claiming that this material is infringing:

Holocaust, Hate Speech & Were the Germans so Stupid?
I think that this is a spurious action; an attempt to infringe my right to freedom of speech and expression under Article 20 of the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights.

While making the video in question I was careful to ensure that any material noted as being the subject of a copyright notice was not used.  Furthermore, I have been unable to find any reference to a person named James Allan Khan on the Internet, using Google’s search engine.

As with all of my videos, this one was made for educational purposes; I will not derive any financial benefit from uploading it, and I sincerely think that the material I’ve used is in the public interest and, therefore, comes under the protection of Fair Use in the copyright law (title 17, U. S. Code) as follows:

Section 107 contains a list of the various purposes for which the reproduction of a particular work may be considered fair, such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, and research. Section 107 also sets out four factors to be considered in determining whether or not a particular use is fair:

  1. The purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes
  2. The nature of the copyrighted work
  3. The amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole
  4. The effect of the use upon the potential market for, or value of, the copyrighted work
http://www.copyright.gov/fls/fl102.html

If the accuser, James Allan Khan can demonstrate otherwise, I will remove the material in question and re-upload the edited video.  If not, I think that it is incumbent on the owners of YouTube to try and prevent Mr. Kahn and others like him from stifling a free exchange of ideas on its otherwise excellent website.

One of the main issues I have with being accused of a copyright infringement, and having one of my videos suspended, more accurately suppressed, is that my accuser was not, apparently, required to make any specific charge as to what image or images or quoted text he has based his claim on (the only musical content in the video is my own work: a single chord).

Accusers should be bound to give YouTube’s legal department a reasonable amount of detail regarding the alleged infringement—at the very least the item that has been allegedly infringed—and this should be passed on to the alleged culprit, who should be given a reasonable amount of time to dispute such a claim, before any action is taken.

Shortly, I will be uploading a video regarding this notice, giving others the benefit of what I have learned from what I think is a spurious attack on my right to freedom of expression as well as my time in having to respond to what I regard as a nuisance accusation.

Sincerely,

Anthony Lawson

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Addendum by The Saker

Here is the “offending” video:



If Blogger also removes this video, I will make it available for download from Rapidshare, Megaupload, Mediafire, The Pirate Bay, Demonoid, Torrent411, Rutor, Rutracker, OneBigTorrent, Wawa-Mania, Quebec-team, TorrentSpain and whatever number of file hosting sites needed to keep it available to those who care about the truth.

The Saker