Wired posted the aftermath of an exchange between the McCain-Palin campaign and YouTube. The net-net of the article is that McCain was a signatory on the DMCA (copyright act) which places certain obligations on to content intermediaries such as YouTube. Succinctly, if you host content, and if someone makes a claim to you that the content is in violation of the DMCA, you have 10 days to take it down or risk losing your “safe harbor” protection from lawsuit.
Apparently there isn’t much wiggleroom in the wording and as a result, YouTube is forced to (just due to the size of it’s operation they cannot review every DMCA notice they receive for validity prior to the 10 day safe harbor window) take content down first and then investigate after.. and only if the contributor objects to the removal of content. In essence, the DMCA notification process can be abused.
And apparently some anti-McCain visitors to the YouTube website have done just that (not to mention all of those who have unlawfully had their copyrighted material “borrowed” for the McCain-Palin campaign), filing a report against the McCain-Palin campaign contributions to YouTube.
Of course, YouTube General Counsel decided to add a little snarkiness at the end of their letter back to the General Counsel for the McCain-Palin campaign (since McCain was partially responsible for the DMCA becoming law):
We hope that as a content uploader, you have gained a sense of some of the challenges we face everyday in operating YouTube
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