YouTube's Acts of Weaselism

YouTube terminated Nick Gisburne's accounts because he kept posting "inappropriate" videos. How inappropriate were they? The latest one consisted of Gisburne sitting in front of a camera, eyes darting back and forth between his computer screen and the lens, reading violent passages directly from the Qur'an — no changes, no comments, although Gisburne did give his video a less than happy-clappy title ("Islamic Teachings: Cruelty from the Qur'an").

How does YouTube give weasels a bad name? Let us count the ways.

Weasel Act Number One was the company's prompt removal of Gisburne's Qur'an video when someone reported it as "inappropriate," most likely because the title didn't cast Islam in a nice multi-culti rainbow glow.

Weasel Act Number Two was YouTube's wide-eyed profession of innocence after word of its decision began to circulate in the last 24 hours. A spokeswoman now claims that her company had never deemed Gisburne's videos inappropriate after all (though YouTube's e-mails to Gisburne disprove this), and that the real reason for the removal had been all along that the footage ran afoul of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

This does not mean what you think it might — that Gisburne read copyrighted material. The Qur'an is in fact not copyrighted, and can be legally downloaded from many places, including here, here, and here. Instead, Gisburne, in his video, had Carl Orff's Carmina Burana playing in the background, which is why YouTube had to delete his handiwork and ban him forever (the company is so adamant that composers and their work be treated with respect that it posthumously changed Mr. Orff's sex by calling him Carol).

Actually, I shouldn't be quite this harsh on YouTube regarding the copyright issue. It's an asinine legal reality — one that YouTube can't singlehandedly change — that seventy years after Orff created the Carmina Burana, and a quarter century after his death, his work is still in the private domain, enriching the do-nothing few (his heirs) at the expense of the many.

Even so, YouTube is certainly guilty of neglecting to mention that it has a troubling history of removing videos it deems too critical of Islam. Very weaselly indeed. If the company's claims in the Gisburne case ring hollow — for instance, because it might seem that YouTube is using copyright law as a club to get rid of users posting unwelcome socio-political content — then the site's management has no one to blame but itself.

(Just to clarify, Nick Gisburne doesn't get to play the free-speech hero either, in my book. Instead of milking the affair for all it's worth, he could easily post his videos under a new account with a different e-mail address, this time sans copyrighted music soundtrack. Of course, playing the martyr is way more fun.)

Comments

[Jozef]

A simple search on YouTube found 29 videos of Carmina Burana and 43 videos of Oh Fortuna (including this very well made piece: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xk4e9V6P700 ). So much for their consistency...

In addition, I'd like to point out that YouTube is not an independent entity anymore; it is a division of Google. As such, it adheres to Google's "do no evil" policy, at least in theory. Anyone criticizing YouTube should keep that in mind and approach Google directly.

[-rich]

If we can't bring Nick Gisburne back to YouTube, then lets bring Nick's story to the rest of the web!