Do they upload it?

Are you one of those fuckwads who has a fucking problem with my gay son getting married?

FCKH8.com is a new initiative by non-profit media campaigner Luke Montgomery in support of LGBT issues. The website gives a big, ol’ Fuck You to the haters of gay marriage and the proponents of denying gay couples benefits like health insurance.

I came across FCKH8 because a gay friend from high school had posted the video to his Facebook wall, and it had turned up in my newsfeed. The bright pink background caught my eye, and the “You will be offended.” tagline inspired the final clickthrough.

Although the embed contains enough expletives to ward off some viewers, especially if they’re viewing in their workplace, it’s a professionally produced video: great aesthetic quality, good caliber of sound, and an energetic cast that gets the point of “screwing hate” across strongly and proudly.

And the marketing has done pretty well so far. Spanning across all of the major sharing sites — Facebook, Twitter, and StumbleUpon — the pink FCKH8 message has already as of yesterday raised close to $30,000 selling T-shirts and other schwag.

But the most interesting part of the FCKH8 campaign is the video strategy. And this strategy is bringing a whole new perspective to how we think about virality, spreadability, whatever you want to call it.

The FCKH8 channel hosts two official videos on their YouTube channel: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1amIrR-VMAI (“NSFW”) and http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aVwLaOtOlQ8 (censored).

However, yesterday, the FCKH8 Twitter account announced that the video had been flagged for removal: “YOUTUBE CENSORS: H8ers campaigned to flag R main video. Uploaded again! Share the FCK out of it!,” seemingly by anti-GLBT protestors.

The interesting note to be made about this message, though, is that “Share the FCK out of it” meant more than just “Share the video, embed it, send the link to your friends, etc.” Instead, dozens of users were inspired and allowed to reupload the original FCKH8 video on their own YouTube channels. Searching “FCKH8″ on YouTube yields “96″ videos, most of which are the original with its iconic hot pink background, with a sprinkling of other response and support vids.

To which I have to say… Fuck. Yes.

When we think about online video strategy by brands, entertainment companies, and producers, we tend to focus on two elements:

1. A piece of media uploaded in lieu of the copyright holders is considered by them, and then — given a positive reception of the illegal uploading — allowed to remain online, an existence from which the copyright holders can reap additional monetary benefits (usually in the form of ads).

2. A piece of media is intended to be spread by users, moving from the “influentials” to their followers and hopefully spreading amongst diverse communities. But this usually includes spreading one piece of media through multiple groups. If there are multiple pieces of media to be spread, companies tend to follow some sort of “transmedia” initiative, where the brand or media is adapted — or sometimes just copied without any change — to other media forms (such as from TV to film to webisode, etc.).

But with this FCKH8 case study, I believe it’s one of the first times when an initiative to spread has allowed users to copy the original media and subsequently spread it, be in via the same or entirely new communities and networks. If we think in terms of the current discourse on piracy, this is astounding.

What makes this case study doubly interesting is that we’re talking about collaborative disruption. Although this initiative is small (less than 100 videos), they are in practice bombing YouTube with repetitive information. Yes, it’s in the face of censorship — although it appears that YouTube has collaborated with the videomakers to reupload the original video after it was flagged for removal. And we can’t necessarily call it “bombing,” because all of the videos either have the same title or append a [MIRROR] tag to the video. In other words, it wouldn’t be difficult for YouTube to suppress the collective action.

But we can compare this to the DDoSing recently by 4chan against the MPAA and other anti-piracy websites or even Justin Bieber fans taking over Twitter’s trending topics (and Bieber’s subsequent complaint about the removal of his fans’ signs of devotion).

Of course, the benefit of FCKH8′s grassroots mass uploading is the eventual spread of a meaningful human rights campaign. Go check out the video, and share it with your friends!

Alex Leavitt, lead researcher for the Web Ecology Project and a tech research specialist at MIT agrees with Locklear — Chatroulette, which launched in November 2009, is not for social networking or making any lasting connections like Twitter or Facebook.

“For social media experts, I doubt that Chatroulette is important at all,” he says. “It’s novel and intriguing, but there’s little there for them to use as business models.”

Instead, it’s almost anti-community-building. It’s quick and minimalist, which, Leavitt says, could be a platform for “interesting things.”

So, I figured I’d just post my answers here. Read on if you’re interested in my reactions to ChatRoulette.

1. I’d like to know what you, personally, think about CR. Is it exciting, frightening?

I heard about ChatRoulette for the first time right before Web Ecology Camp 3, where we performed our research for the ChatRoulette report. I thought the concept was pretty hilarious, which I feel how people around my age (22) react as well. I’ve heard that older folk feel a bit adverse to or confused with the idea of talking with strangers online (especially via webcam). But I’ve actually had some pretty awesome experiences on ChatRoulette: one night some friends and I talked to a male college student in Turkey for almost two hours, after having spoken to another group of college students in Norway for another 45 minutes. Some people will try to talk to you while others will click Next in less than a second. I just think that most people should approach ChatRoulette with a sense of humor, ready to click Next when they encounter content they don’t like.

2. I’d love to know why you think this is such a big story for journalists and for social media experts. Why is this site different than the billions of other sites that come online every week?

I think that the site is full of such hype for journalists because it’s the “big thing” on the Internet right now: it’s controversial only because there’s occasionally explicit content. Given that over the past couple of years, news outlets have begun to cover online content more thoroughly, I do not find it strange that ChatRoulette eventually was picked up. The hype also built as major sources ran anecdotal articles about it; I believe that New York Magazine was the first. Even more organizations are jumping onto the bandwagon now that the New York Times and even Jon Stewart have run coverage.

For social media experts, I doubt that ChatRoulette is important at all. It’s novel and intriguing, but there’s little there for them to use as business models. Of course, we’re talking about “social media experts” as in people who are hired to analyze social networks for potential marketing purposes.

As for us at the Web Ecology Project, we find ChatRoulette primarily interesting because it’s an online system that has done something new: the platform does not allow for the creation of lasting connections between users, unlike other social networks (which emphasize connections). In fact, we might think of ChatRoulette possessing anti-network attributes. This type of system is why we dub the social structure that forms around ChatRoulette a “probabilistic community,” because the code of ChatRoulette ensures that a community might never form. Also, we find ChatRoulette particularly awesome because it was constructed with a minimalist approach, just like other online spaces that foster bits of Internet culture, like Craigslist.org or 4chan.org. The less restraints by the platform, the more capabilities users possess to produce interesting things.

3. I’ve been hearing from people that CR reminds them of sort of the “Dawn of Time” of the Internet. Like chat rooms in AOL and the like, where there was no moderation. Is this something you think about?

I can understand why people want to think of ChatRoulette like AOL chatrooms, and while I would like to agree (it’s a bit nostalgic, since I was in middle school when I used AOL as a hangout), they’re not the same. First, in terms of how each platform works, it’s true that interacting on AOL’s chatrooms frequently produced conversations between strangers, but random encounters there are not any different from those on modern Internet forums (or ordinary face-to-face networking in real life for that matter).

As for moderation, ChatRoulette is actually bounded by community-driven moderation: there is a Report button at the top of the page, and according to a recent interview with Andrey Ternovskiv once a user is Report-ed 3 times, his or her IP address is banned from the site. Even sites like 4chan are run by moderators, albeit only for the most extreme explicit content, but it’s still moderation all the same.

4. Does CR prove (not like we needed any more evidence!) that anonymity will bring about sexual impulses, voyeurism and exhibitionism?

Anonymity does not equate to sexual deviancy (“sexual impulses, voyeurism, and exhibitionism”). However, those users exhibiting explicit content on ChatRoulette have already solved the equation that makes up the “web ecology” of the website — how the platform shapes user interaction, and (vice-versa) how users then shape the culture of the platform. These specific users are simply taking advantage of the website’s architecture. However, I believe that the moderation of the site on top of (as we explain in our report) the influx of a multitude of new users will help decrease the chance of encountering explicit content on ChatRoulette. Then again, you also have to take into account the current community on the site: about 1/4 of ChatRoulette’s users are from the United States, so it’s possible that more encounters with explicit content will occur after 8:00 pm (when most people are sitting in the privacy of their own home).

5. Do you think CR has any value other than being just a neat pastime?

ChatRoulette certainly has value, but it may be more theoretical and academic than anything else. It certainly is an interesting case study for those interested in examining how communities form online, especially given the restraints of particular platforms. Other significant areas of study might be around issues of perception (eg., Nexting click-through rates based on who or what appears) or cultural production (eg., Are there trends in the appearance of masks on ChatRoulette?).

ChatRoulette has for me been an interesting space for social gaming. A few people have held up signs saying “Make this face.” or “Thumbs up for science!” that have garnered a lot of participants. The existence of communities outside of ChatRoulette that uses ChatRoulette as an interface for content (such as http://catroulette.tumblr.com, which we use as an example in the report) have been using game-like strategies to interact with other users. It seems that Andrey actually changed the Start button to New Game recently, which in relation to this point about gaming is a bit philosophical in itself!

6. Finally, (I have to ask) do you have any concerns about young people being exposed to nudity, masturbation and possible sexual predators on the site? Does CR reinforce anything about parenting and the Internet?

Obviously a site where practically anything can appear might be daunting for parents. When I was younger, my parents didn’t know much about the Internet when I frequented Neopets.com, AOL chatrooms, and the like in the late ’90s/early ’00s. As long as parents educate their children to use common sense while being aware of their surroundings, I think that kids should be able to explore online spaces. Most of what my parents taught me about going out to play in the neighborhood I applied to the online realm back then as well. Certain parents will moderate what their children do online, while others won’t give a damn. And as my friend and colleague danah boyd writes, “Can youth get themselves into trouble here? Sure… like in most public places.” Of course, ChatRoulette also states on the initial page, “You have to be at least 16 years old to use our service.” While this message might not deter as many users as might 4chan’s Disclaimer pop-up when you approach the boards with explicit content, it’s there. We just have to trust that younger users will make informed decisions when they use sites like ChatRoulette.

7. Oops! One more: Is there anything you’d like to change about the site?

I have had thoughts about possible tweaks that Andrey could make to ChatRoulette. For example, I wouldn’t mind having a timer, so that I could see how long each of my conversations (or lack thereof) lasts. But Andrey has stated that most likely he will not implement any major changes to the site. There have already been spin-off sites created with extra moderation or other features, but I would like to take the example of the probabilistic community and extend it further for other applications. For example, what might a social network look like if it deleted all of your friends after three months? I think that experimenting with restraints like these will lead to some fun and surprising online social spaces in the near future.

In the last week of January, an interesting conversational thread broke out on the Association of Internet Researchers mailing list regarding a video about scholarship in the “critical commons,” on the debate between digital humanities and media studies. The video follows below, but judging by the preview image it might not be exactly what you expect:

Professor Charles Ess reacted to the video, writing:

How profoundly disappointing, if not on the edge of insulting. If (a) you know German reasonably well, and especially if (b) you’ve seen the terrific film, Der Untergang, that is ripped off here – it doesn’t strike me as funny at all. (emphasis mine)

Jeremy Hunsinger, who had circulated the video to the mailing list, responded:

It is actually just a spin off of a meme that uses this clip from that movie, there are probably 30 or so different re-texts and mashups i’ve seen of this clip. The joke, i think, of the meme is that it never ever comes close to the German, nor is it ever supposed to, nor is the content really supposed to be evil or really related to the clip, it is a play of contrasts and a play of hyperbole. I think you hit it on the head, it is supposed to be contrary to intentions, that’s sort of its point. … however, i’m pretty sure that neither german, nor evil is supposed to be the point here. (emphasis mine)

Before elucidating the above situation (the entire thread of which can be viewed in the AoIR archives here), I want to take a step back to examine the idea of “meme” — a unit of cultural information — once more. We’ve encountered memes before at the Consortium, particularly in Henry Jenkins’s white paper, If It Doesn’t Spread, It’s Dead, written by Xiaochang Li and Ana Domb Krauskopf, with Joshua Green. On his blog, Henry briefly explains the history behind the idea of memes and its confusion with the buzzword “viral”:

Talking about memes and viral media places an emphasis on the replication of the original idea, which fails to consider the everyday reality of communication — that ideas get transformed, repurposed, or distorted as they pass from hand to hand, a process which has been accelerated as we move into network culture.

However, I would point out that the replication and transformation of ideas are part of a dependent relationship that informs us as to the lifecycle of an idea.

I have written before about comprehension of memes, particularly those that replicate online, over at The Department of Alchemy. Back in April 2009 in my article, Internet Culture Research: New (?) Thoughts on Memes, I wrote about the origins of understanding culture through evolutionary steps, as positioned by Richard Dawkins in The Selfish Gene (1976):

To elucidate the construction of the metaphor [of biological processes], Susan Blackmore, in her paper Evolution and Memes: The human brain as a selective imitation device, writes, “As Darwin (1859) first pointed out, if you have creatures that vary, and if there is selection so that only some of those creatures survive, and if the survivors pass on to their offspring whatever it was that helped them survive, then those offspring must, on average, be better adapted to the environment in which that selection took place than their parents were… If you have the three requisites – variation, selection and heredity, then you must get evolution… This [evolutionary] algorithm depends on something being copied, and Dawkins calls this the replicator. A replicator can therefore be defined as any unit of information which is copied with variations or errors, and whose nature influences its own probability of replication (Dawkins 1976).” Quoting Dawkins, Blackmore names the element of transmission shared by genes and memes: they both replicate with variations. Replication with variation is then how Dawkins explains his concept of the evolution of culture, how ideas move, the meme: “The new soup is the soup of human culture. We need a name for the new replicator, a noun that conveys the idea of a unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of imitation.”

While Henry dismisses the term “meme,” I embrace it, because its use particularly emphasizes the origins (past) and potentialities (future) of an idea. Understanding ideas as memes helps us construct family trees for those ideas, but it also helps us understand how we understand ideas.

Henry argues that spreadability adds value to an idea by allowing the idea to inhabit different contexts. He states:

Rather than emphasizing the direct replication of “memes,” a spreadable model assumes that the repurposing and transformation of media content adds value, allowing media content to be localized to diverse contexts of use.

However, I argue that the referential knowledge inherent to the subcultural network behind Internet memes allows for an increased understanding and application in new and different contexts.

Returning to the video above: While Ess’s reaction to the video should not be discounted, it is somewhat misinformed. As Hunsinger correctly explains, the video comes from an evolutionary, memetic chain of similar videos, which place subtitles over the iconic scene from Oliver Hirschbiegel’s Der Untergang (Downfall; 2004), a film that depicts the last days of Adolf Hitler in Germany. The meme, however, evades the historically dramatic tone of the film in favor of a number of comedic situations. The succession of these videos has been dubbed The Hitler Meme (or “Hitler finds out”) in the Know Your Meme database (which archives Internet meme phenomena for a general audience; for a more subcultural approach, Encyclopedia Dramatica explains the Downfall videos here [NSFW]).

The origins and history of the Hitler Meme are fairly vague. Last week, I spoke with Jamie Wilkinson, lead researcher for Know Your Meme, who sent out a call to find the first iteration of the chain. Based on this original scene…

… the earliest-uploaded step turns out to be the Spanish-subtitled “Sim Heil: Der untersim,” uploaded to YouTube on 10 August 2006, in which Hitler complains about “the lack of new features in the demo trial of Microsoft’s Flight Simulator X” (Know Your Meme).

The video was later uploaded with English subtitles by the same user on 30 August 2006, but was eventually removed due to a copyright claim by Constantin Film Produktion GmbH (Downfall’s film studio).

As the Spanish video’s description states, the Der Untergang spoof started as a joke (“Simplemente una broma en forma de video”), like most Internet memes. And like most jokes, one must understand the references to comprehend the humor. However, as more and more Downfall videos were created, the joke evolved into a two-fold structure: the joke portrayed in the subtitles, and the video as a joke in itself. To exemplify the binary, two videos follow:

Hitler gets banned from Xbox Live, currently the most-watched Hitler Meme video on YouTube, with over 3.5 million views.

What does Hitler think of the Downfall meme?, a meta-commentary on the Hitler Meme with a Hitler meme video

The Hitler Meme has already gained widespread attention, appearing for example in Wired Magazine (Hitler Remixes Are Big — on YouTube) and the New York Times (The Hitler Meme). But what value does it hold for us trying to understand the Internet’s influence on producers and consumers?

First, we can look quickly at the appropriation of the footage from Der Untergang for a very different purpose. It might be understandable that these videos are instances of fair use, but according to the YouTomb archives, Hitler Memes have been removed from YouTube by Constantin Film Produktion GmbH over 50 times. Perhaps the uploaders of the parodies did not file DMCA counternotices, or there might be moral ambiguity in the fair use of this material (even though there seems to be a trend in online comedy toward associating humor with Hitler, typified by Godwin’s Law).

Second, even though “a dramatic recreation of Hitler’s last stand is not exactly a laugh-out-loud subject,” the director of the film, Oliver Hirschbiegel, has reacted to these fan(?)-producers of his work, positively. Very recently (15 Jaunary 2010), the Vulture section of New York Magazine Online reported that Hirschbiegel approves and supports these mashups of his film:

“Someone sends me the links every time there’s a new one,” says the director, on the phone from Vienna. “I think I’ve seen about 145 of them! Of course, I have to put the sound down when I watch. Many times the lines are so funny, I laugh out loud, and I’m laughing about the scene that I staged myself! You couldn’t get a better compliment as a director.

One of the director’s favorite parodies, about Michael Jackson’s death.

As for the idea of such a serious scene being used for laughs, Hirschbiegel thinks it actually fits with the theme of the movie. “The point of the film was to kick these terrible people off the throne that made them demons, making them real and their actions into reality,” he says. “I think it’s only fair if now it’s taken as part of our history, and used for whatever purposes people like.” He adds, “If only I got royalties for it, then I’d be even happier.”

These reactions from the director seem to go against the actions that his film company have taken in having videos removed from YouTube, but it’s a particularly interesting relationship of producer-consumer that is particularly heightened because of the ease of access to video editing and sharing hubs online.

Third, and probably most important, the Hitler Meme videos represent a convenient entry point for Internet culture to merge with communication and media studies in the academy.

Let me reiterate two points that I made above: 1) Memes help us understand how we understand ideas; and my main argument, 2) The referential knowledge inherent to the subcultural network behind Internet memes allows for an increased understanding and application in new and different contexts. To expound the first point, let me approach the latter first.

The confusion behind comprehension of Internet memes tends to be that they belong to an informational subculture of digital (mostly) youth inhabiting spaces such as 4chan (an anonymous imageboard) and Something Awful (a popular forum). Unlike some subcultures in which participation is through the association of fashion or philosophy (eg., goth subculture), this online subculture thrives in information appropriation, management, and consumption. It is, basically, a media subculture. And in consuming an infinite amount of media, authenticity in the subculture amounts to recognizing references made to these multiple films, games, music, celebrities, etc.

As a subculture, it makes sense that an outsider will not be able to understand references made within the subculture. Again, we cannot blame Ess for missing the purpose of the Hitler Meme, having never experienced the video chain before. As he explains:

it seems that for at least a few of us, the effort at humor doesn’t work.

The Hitler Meme particularly makes immediately association with the meme a bit difficult as well, since it deals with potentially objectionable material (unlike LOLcats, for example). Before a memetic video titled “Hitler’s Ultimate Downfall” was removed from YouTube, it was initially blocked in Germany and Poland, among a few other countries (YouTomb).

And as Professor Christian Fuchs writes of his viewing:

probably another influence here is that my cultural background is the german-speaking world, so i tend to view all media content related to the nazis with great care.

But as with most Internet memes, especially since they promote humorous situations, the association of the new meaning connoted by the meme tends to be displaced from the original meaning of the appropriated media. In his close reading of the video, Fuchs writes:

The video is making two false analogies. The Nazis would today probably support Internet censorship, Internet surveillance, etc. And actual Nazi groups are trying to use the Internet for their own propaganda, but most of these sites work in a traditional way without much employment of “social media” and “web 2.0″. One can argue if this video is funny or distasteful – these are unnecessary moral discussions, but one thing is for sure: the clip is unintelligent.

However, Hunsinger points out that a close reading is the wrong approach, and retorts:

The clip has nothing to do with Nazi’s or evil or censorship. The meme is playing purely off the emotional portrayals. … It is the reproduction and reconstruction of those meanings in relation to the emotions that make this work. … As I indicated, some people might not be ideal for this meme, audiences differ. However, if you are going to read the meme, you should try to do it justice within its own genre, that is my basic argument.

Let me return to a question posed earlier. Now that we have established that the sequence of videos based on Der Untergang holds meaning for a specific digital subculture, what value does it possess? I mean to draw a line between meaning and value, because to the latter I attribute a sense of beneficial worth. People can associate with Internet memes, but what can they derive from them?

To set up an approach for answering this question, I will return to an article I wrote previously for the Consortium, which contains notes from a talk I attended by MIT Media Lab professor Judith Donath (Human Signaling: Competition and Cooperation in Everyday Communication). In this presentation, Judith explains that these small and subtle subcultural references and jokes, in memetic fashion, create structural meaning beyond the simple meaning that one video or picture might hold. Primarily, she uses examples from the LOLcat phenomenon, which are various pictures of cats with short captions attached to each photo. While the picture-phrase combinations can vary, a handful of these combinations rely on a certain grammar to connote meaning (and I do not mean the childish wording that LOLcats tend to promote). Instead, I mean the repetition of specific phrasings that in themselves are smaller memes in the LOLcat meme universe. Anil Dash, in his article, Cats Can Has Grammar, points out a few of these:

• I’M IN UR X Ying your Z. This construct, based on i’m in ur base, killin ur d00ds has morphed into a catch-all structure for annotating cat pictures.

• Invisible Item. Variations on the seminal Invisible Bike, these are images of cats, usually in midair, with captions that prompt us to fill in imaginary objects or actions that complete the scene. There’s something brilliant to these images, speaking to our mind’s ability to intuitively extrapolate unseen details.

• Kitty Pidgin. And finally, the newly dominant lolcats, of the family I Can Has Cheezeburger? These seem to be spawning nearly infinite variations, and have exploded in popularity since being named “lolcats” instead of the more general “image macro” or “cat macro”.

NOTE: The third bullet here does not represent one of the structural meanings; instead, this kitty pidgin is the “childish wording” to which I refer above.

With “I’m in ur X, Ying your Z” and “Invisible X,” as Judith explains, each of these jokes becomes a phrase with embodied meaning. It is a structure through which we can understand not just a joke but also a way of comprehending a context. For example, a common image macro (the form of a LOLcat) is the “You’re Doing It Wrong”:

The image with the phrase is a joke in itself, but it also contains a structural meaning of an ironic situation that appears to be correct from another (albeit incorrect) perspective. Explanation: in the above picture, the soldier is fighting with a weapon and holding it like a bow, but it is obviously a gun.

Pushing the structural meaning of the meme to another level, then, is the following iteration:

By applying the meme to the protest image above, the author gives value to the You’re Doing It Wrong structure. And our understanding of the image is mediated by the meme: while the protesters believe that they are correct, the author illustrates a particular political statement against their beliefs.

Now, while the subcultural joke is still present, the meme provides another way of approaching the picture’s context. Perhaps not for people outside of the subculture (although this particular instance is fairly easy to understand). Therefore, to further illustrate my previous point, this meme increases our understanding (and possibly appreciation) of the political statement for this picture now that the meme is applied to a new and different context.

The Hitler Meme is a bit more difficult to comprehend, evidenced by the email thread. However, it is fairly simple to understand when we examine the narrative of the video rather than its content. Without explaining the actual content of the video (since it obviously varies with each parody), let me do a close reading of the structure of the Hitler Meme:

- actor sets up situation, which superior seems to understand
- superior confirms that he understands
- actor(s) introduce problem that contradicts superior’s understanding
- superior suggests his frustration in extended silence
- superior explodes in confused anger
- superior realizes he cannot overcome problem
- superior accepts problem

This is a fairly simple narrative structure that introduces a problem and illustrates its embellished reaction (helped in particular by the exaggerated body language and facial expressions). Each Hitler Meme video establishes a problem with a (usually hilarious) tirade about a (sometimes banal; occasionally significant) crisis. Regardless of the quality of the issue at stake, the Hitler Meme presents a joke (basic meaning) whose structure dictates further meaning when applied to multiple contexts.

Finally, then, what is the value of the Hitler Meme? We can see that memes can be used to emphasize certain aspects of an issue (eg., the irony of the gay rights protesters). Coincidentally, a fairly recent use of the Hitler Meme has been used at a local university, which also happens to be my alma mater.

At the start of the fall semester of 2009, Boston University announced that it would be downsizing students’ print quotas. Reducing the quota from 500 pages to 100 pages, both students and professors raised protesting voices all around campus. Boston.com reports (BU limits paper route for students):

While the university has encouraged professors to move their readings and handouts online – which means students would be responsible for printing them out – it has limited undergraduates to printing 100 free pages per semester. After that, it’s 12 cents per page, even though the Kinko’s on campus charges 10 cents a page. Graduate students get 500 sheets; and law students are allocated 1,000 sheets.

Boston University’s student-run Daily Free Press (Faculty members frustrated by print quota changes) also writes:

[S]ome faculty members have also experienced trouble adjusting, especially given the late notice of the change, they said. Others, meanwhile, said they had not noticed any impact from the reduced print quota. “I haven’t changed that much,” Writing lecturer Amy Chmielewski said. “I still have my students print out the readings. It’s under 100 pages, so it’s still cheaper than textbooks.” President Robert Brown apologized for not telling faculty members about the change earlier, which would have allowed them to adjust students’ access to material, according to an Oct. 14 Daily Free Press article.

In the midst of the turmoil, one exemplary reaction surfaced on YouTube: Der Printergang (uploaded on 14 October 2009). The video references buildings across Boston University’s campus, a handful of the University’s colleges & students, and even Boston College’s lower printing prices. The video ends with Hitler’s words of hope: “I don’t have term papers for another few weeks. There’s still time for a printing injection.”

The use of this meme in the Boston University printing crisis works extremely well, and the video was passed around across students networks on Facebook and Twitter rapidly. Eventually, by Internet or word of mouth, the video made it to multiple university administrators (on which the Daily Free Press also reports). Dean of Students Kenneth Elmore reacts on his own blog:

Students, as Nazis, concerned about University print policies and residential computer labs – I know it’s over the top, and I do get the point – ouch! Heard the word on the street about this video throughout campus, including conversations with administrators and faculty. I refrained from replying to folk with DM and e-mail links so I could think about it before I passed it on or made comment. Don’t misread me – I’m not a killjoy; I love a good remix; I live for decent satire; I adore commentary on things going on; and, I think human around race, culture, and ethnicity, when done right, is some of the funniest stuff I’ve heard. My gut told me that this time I needed to move on. Not sure we’re at a point where people portraying Nazis makes good satire. Reminded me of the unease I felt this summer with the Nazi commentary and remarks embedded in some conversations and demonstrations about health care. Maybe we should be over it. Maybe I’m just part of a generation that’s needlessly sensitive about these images and what they have implied – perhaps it’s time for us to grow up and appreciate humor.

Even in this situation, the video’s content is questioned. However, the video-as-meme lends particular emphasis to the situation. Yes, the video is certainly humorous because it is quite exaggerated, but the anonymous uploader of Der Printergang uses this meme to point out the relatively outrageous problem (and the heightened reactions that are fairly appropriate) to an audience of students, most of whom would understand the memetic reference and appreciate the criticism of the school.

Memes tend to be jokes, first, but they represent a valuable example of networked knowledge online. Although most memes do not escape the subcultural barriers of small Internet communities, a few do make an impact on the real world. Of course, many Internet memes are simply humor. But the evolutionary structure of some memes create a strong cultural value that acts as a grammar for information networks.

Today is the deadline for panel submissions, and last night I sent in three presentations that will hopefully make it onto the schedule in a few months. Check them out below!

1) Memes, Microcultures, and 2D Chicks: Our Future in the Otaku Gamer

A singing idol who doesn’t exist. Perverted text adventures boasting dozens of female prizes. And a popular, anime-tized evolution of the classic Space Invaders shooter that has spawned a global fandom. Japan’s subcultural players are obsessed with games that, well, aren’t actually about the gaming. Alex Leavitt (Comparative Media Studies, MIT) explains how a new generation of entertainment is succeeding in a market which chooses to de-emphasize the games in favor of the characters. And as the Japanese fans influence the industry through their own amateur initiatives, what will the future of American gaming hold when online fandoms adopt similar appetites?

2) Exploring International Geek Cultures Through Games

Even in the era of Internet forums and online gaming communities, our understanding of how and why geeks come together through games is pretty pathetic. From Europe to Asia to America, this panel takes a look at the technological environment in which gamers grew up and the transnational space in which geeks play today. Join Alex Leavitt (Comparative Media Studies, MIT) as he moderates a discussion between Philip Tan (Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab), Prof. Mia Consalvo (Visiting Professor, MIT), and Dr. Clara Fernández-Vara (GAMBIT) on the modern convergence and recurrent differences of the national geek factions that make up the global gaming ecosystem.

3) Trolling the Tubes: Culture Hacking Through Online Gaming

Thousands of Internet users cultivate pixelated gardens in Farmville, raise cyber-chickens in Second Life, and earn livings on Mechanical Turk without realizing that they are changing the face of online culture. From FreeRice to OKCupid, from gold miners in China to 4chan-ers in America, Alex Leavitt (Comparative Media Studies, MIT) takes a look at how online communities are redefining our friends, reorganizing our lives, and restructuring our society into a gaming culture. What will the future of the Internet look like when social networking might mean a social battleground of bots, trolls, and colorful flamewars?

Ever since I got involved with ROFLcon (I attended the very first one and have been working with the team on hosting the smaller ROFLthing events since), I have had Internet culture research on my mind. Tim Hwang and I have talked over potentially writing co-writing a book on Internet memes, but recently the project has sunk below our interest in meme research, specifically that of engineering. But ever since “meme” because the Internet buzzword of our generation, I’ve constantly been at odds with the odd term. What exactly is a meme? Why are we using that specific word? And what do we learn about the Internet by studying memes, or vice versa?

If you haven’t decided to discover the term’s etymology, I’ll try to provide a basic explanation. Trying to explain the meaning of meme by looking at Wikipedia illustrates the issue of defining the word: throwing “meme” into Google provides you with both two articles on Wikipedia, the first entitled Meme and the second, Internet Meme. The discussion of meme here draws from the article Internet Meme; however, we cannot ignore the history behind the former article, especially since work around Internet memes borrows heavily from studies of memetics.

The etymology of the word meme is derived from the biological term gene. Merriam-Webster defines gene as “a specific sequence of nucleotides in DNA or RNA that is located usually on a chromosome and that is the functional unit of inheritance controlling the transmission and expression of one or more traits by specifying the structure of a particular polypeptide and especially a protein or controlling the function of other genetic material,” but I prefer Wikipedia’s simplistic explanation better: “Genes hold… information to build and maintain… cells and pass genetic traits to offspring.” Examining Wikipedia’s explanation, we can understand a gene in two ways: 1) it contains information, and 2) it transfers that information.

The term meme was coined by the biologist Richard Dawkins in his book, “The Selfish Gene,” (1976) to explain the movement of ideas and the formation of culture through the metaphor of biological processes.

To elucidate the construction of the metaphor, Susan Blackmore, in her paper Evolution and Memes: The human brain as a selective imitation device, writes, “As Darwin (1859) first pointed out, if you have creatures that vary, and if there is selection so that only some of those creatures survive, and if the survivors pass on to their offspring whatever it was that helped them survive, then those offspring must, on average, be better adapted to the environment in which that selection took place than their parents were… If you have the three requisites – variation, selection and heredity, then you must get evolution… This [evolutionary] algorithm depends on something being copied, and Dawkins calls this the replicator. A replicator can therefore be defined as any unit of information which is copied with variations or errors, and whose nature influences its own probability of replication (Dawkins 1976).” Quoting Dawkins, Blackmore names the element of transmission shared by genes and memes: they both replicate with variations. Replication with variation is then how Dawkins explains his concept of the evolution of culture, how ideas move, the meme: “The new soup is the soup of human culture. We need a name for the new replicator, a noun that conveys the idea of a unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of imitation.”

To explain the actions of a meme, Dawkins illustrates them once again with the biological analogy: “Just as genes propagate themselves in the gene pool by leaping from body to body via sperms or eggs, so memes propagate themselves in the meme pool by leaping from brain to brain via a process which, in the broad sense, can be called imitation.” However, Blackmore points out the difficulty of Dawkins’ explanation, writing, “The problem is this. If memes worked like genes then we should expect to find close analogies between the two evolutionary systems. But, although both are replicators, they work quite differently and for this reason we should be very cautious of meme-gene analogies. I suggest there is no clean equivalent of the genotype/phenotype distinction in memetics because memes are a relatively new replicator and have not yet created for themselves this highly efficient kind of system. Instead there is a messy system in which information is copied all over the place by many different means. I previously gave the example of someone inventing a new recipe for pumpkin soup and passing it on to various relatives and friends (Blackmore 1999). The recipe can be passed on by demonstration, by writing the recipe on a piece of paper, by explaining over the phone, by sending a fax or e-mail, or (with difficulty) by tasting the soup and working out how it might have been cooked.” She counters, “The whole point of memes is to see them as information being copied in an evolutionary process (i.e. with variation and selection). Given the complexities of human life, information can be copied in myriad ways. We do a disservice to the basic concept of the meme if we try to restrict it to information residing only inside people’s heads.” However, I believe that Blackmore’s statement, at least in an age where the Internet is general, accessible, and popular, is fairly known and thence a bit redundant given common sense. The one element that can be gleaned by her comment, though, is that while the transfer of ideas undergoes change (“variation”), it also undergoes “selection,” meaning that people eventually weed out ideas from the initial batch. This counteracts the stereotypical marketer’s view of the meme as “viral” because of the possibility for an idea to be discarded, rather than passed on to other people.

In relation to Dawkins’ explanation, the problem for me is not that he explains the concept of the meme in terms of a biological metaphor, but that people examining memes today have latched onto the concept of biology not as a means of elucidating memes but of approaching and investigating them. Case in point would be Mike Godwin’s WIRED article about memes, in which he writes, “A “meme,” of course, is an idea that functions in a mind the same way a gene or virus functions in the body. And an infectious idea (call it a “viral meme”) may leap from mind to mind, much as viruses leap from body to body.” In terms of the definition, Dawkins’ use of “brain” immediately calls researchers of memes to focus on the way the mind works and how ideas transfer between brains. However, I think that a fundamental change must be made here, and that is to examine memes as transferred between not physical brains but nebulous minds. By this I mean not that the physical nature of the persons involved in the transmission of ideas should be emphasized but instead we should focus on the (sociological?) relations between people to understand culture.

Second, Dawkins explains the meme concept by suggesting that memes might take on an entity of their own, in that “memes propagate themselves in the meme pool by leaping from brain to brain.” Unlike some members of the Free Culture movement, I do not believe that information wants to be “free.” In fact, I believe that information does not move at all, at least by its own volition. Instead, people move information. People want information to be free, so people move ideas to match a system that lets them be free. Therefore, my thesis might be stated as people move information, and out of that statement I want to understand memes as people pushing ideas to other people — not a very “biological” concept in the least.

The interesting thing about the Internet is that it is full of people. However, only in the last few years have people been recognized as a presence, though of course one still minor to the extent of information on the Web. Still, they’ve finally be noticed, particularly since the spread of the popular buzzword, Web 2.0. However, the basic theories around the movement of information through the Internet does not seem to entirely account for the presence of people. Recent publications have begun to approach it, like Clay Shirky’s Here Comes Everybody, but I feel that the text as well as projects like the Berkman Center’s Internet and Democracy project (to use as an example, not to call it out in a negative light) only approach the human element of the Internet as an affect of the Internet rather than a fundamental part or function of it.

Tim has talked many times about Yochai Benkler‘s Layers of Communication, which illustrates the structure of the Internet and how information moves across it. However, recently at SXSW Tim presented a panel on the future of the memescape, and he had to somehow account for the emergence of memes in real life. How else to do so but apply a human layer at some point to Benkler’s equation. Of course, the human element applies all over the above graphic: people create and set up the physical layer; people code the websites and applications; people upload and submit the information. We could think of each color tab with a tiny orange piece attached that would be the “human knob.”

But I think we need to think of a human layer as integral to the structure of the Internet, specifically a human layer separate from the other three tiers. The graph would then look like this:

Thinking about the structure of the Internet this way makes sense. The physical layer provides the module on which the Internet runs and users interact (eg., through fingers on a keyboard and looking at a screen, which then travels over a wire to other fingers and eyes), the code forms what we recognize at the Internet’s visual structure (as well as the inner workings of the Web via applications), the content is the information that we want/need to see, and the human layer moves all of that information through that code over the physical elements. to other humans.

Internet futurists have already attempted to tear apart the structure that I am proposing here. I present as evidence the semantic web. Basically the semantic web is an attempt to create an Internet in which the human layer no longer needs to exist. To explain that statement further, essentially computers cannot read all of the information on the Web, because it was built by people for people. For example, proof might be Google search: although it helps us find a lot of wonderful things, it is not necessarily the best method for finding everything that we need. To combat that imperfection, the semantic web was created to provide information in a format that machines could easily read, thus helping humans find information faster. We can think of the semantic web as hacking the human layer of the web by rerouting that layer through the code layer.

However, I don’t believe it to be that simple a solution. My assumption is that to find information, we need to find people. I can immediately dismiss my previous statement by saying that the Internet already allows that to be possible. Simply reading this article means that you have found information without having had to find me to provide you with that information. However, I will rephrase my statement to make more sense: To find the information we want, we need to find people.

It is here that my research with the anime fandom in America first coincides with my research on Internet culture. They link in two ways (the second of which I will examine later). First, in trying to find information for my research, I have had to contact multiple people, because it is essentially not on the Web. Currently, we rely on information that already exists when we search for it online. The semantic web, too, relies on the fact that the information its code provides to users of the semantic web already exists. If it does not, the code (basically, XML) must be applied to the information as it is uploaded to the Internet. One of Tim’s most recent questions has been about the potential for an Internet EPA. Basically, such an organization (?) would commit to providing relevant information of quality for users of the Web. However, to find information that does not exist on the Web yet, we need to go to people that have or will provide that information. A basic issue right now with finding relevant information of quality is that if you stumble upon a blog that you feel provides you with that information, will the author(s) of that blog continue to provide you with the same quality or relevance of information. This might be a common issue with communication in general, but especially so on the Internet because direct contact is usually not available for both communicative ends (whether or not the author is anonymous). Also, if you wanted to find a certain piece of information and it did not exist, how do you go about finding the person(s) that would provide it to you?

The aspect of connecting not with information but people is where the human layer of the Internet especially comes into play, and where I believe research on Internet memes needs to focus.

First, though, I must reexamine the concept of the meme to apply it to the Internet. As I stated before, Wikipedia draws on two concepts of meme: Meme and Internet Meme. The Wikipedia entry for Internet Meme makes a bold statement: “The term is a reference to the concept of memes, although this concept refers to a much broader category of cultural information.” The author here suggests that Internet memes do not encapsulate the entirety of cultural information that exists outside of the Internet. And, actually, I agree. To clarify my agreement, I would simply state that Internet memes deal with popular culture.

My statement requires two explications. First, to distinguish between memes and Internet memes, I suggest that we can look at the concept of the “meme” as a movement, while “Internet meme” is a manifestation of that movement. When we say meme, we mean an idea, a cultural product, but also that it moves in a certain way. When we say Internet meme, the nominative “Internet” does not denote that the movement of the meme relies on some new Internet-based form of movement; rather, the Internet relies on popular culture, and hence an Internet meme is a meme of popular culture. Second, to explain the phrase “meme of popular culture,” I must define popular culture. However, I will not define it as much as name criteria for the term’s application. Popular culture depends on access and audience. More specifically, the culture of popular culture is that which is accessible by the general populace (in that they can interact with it), and it is culture to which the audience relates. Of course, not all popular culture might be considered “popular” culture given certain contexts: for example, a movie that can be seen in a theater in the city might not be available in the countryside, but it is generally accessible nonetheless.

Now, by “meme of popular culture,” I mean that an Internet meme is a piece of popular culture that moves like a meme, in that its audience replicates it and is selective of it. Taking the Internet meme as a popular culture meme, though, helps us understand the human layer and thence the movement of communication and information online, because when we observe the production of memes, they usually derive from popular (widespread) media or popular (favored) ideas. The importance of popular culture to meme studies is that it brings attention to the audience, or basically the people moving around these bits of culture.

It is particularly important to look at the concept of audience when examining memes because the Internet warps the real-life model, in that it can easily be analyzed. Online, with the potential for anonymity, finding reliable suppliers of information proves difficult. However, when we examine sites of cultural production online, specifically for memes, one of the origins of course is the bulletin board system known as 4chan.

Before tackling the structure of 4chan, I’ll mention that here we now approach the second relation to my research on the anime fandom: the ability to compare systems. When I study anime in the United States, I must also take into account its origins in Japan, which boasts its own fan culture, which even today influences the American fan base. A similar thing happens with 4chan, whose origins were in the Japanese board system, 2channel. Over at Metagold: A Research Blog About Nico Nico Douga (the Japanese video service similar to YouTube), the author writes, “X gives me first a basic introduction into the workings of the legendary BBS (Bulletin board system) 2channel, the direct predecessor of Nico Nico Douga. 2channel is important for Nico Nico Douga in many ways. Most importantly, it has made the culture of anonymous posting popular – it might indeed be a Western misconception to see Nico Nico Douga as a form of Youtube plus BBS. More precisely, it is a BBS plus video. The BBS culture was there first, and it remains the central driving force of Nico Nico Douga… Posts on 2channel normally only appear under the IP address –. Entries are therefore not only anonymous in the sense that they are hidden under a pseudonym. Normally it is impossible to connect the many entries that one user has made. Theoretically, people can also create an identity, but this is tricky, and hardly ever done. 2channel is all about radical anonymity, and this was its great revolution.” In relation to 4chan, then, the anonymity of the users defines the structure. Essentially, a user who posts information on the anonymous board need not worry about the implications of those reading his posts. Therefore, 4chan and 2channel act as a sort of semi-human-layered system, where the system connects the users to those who want to find relevant information in real time, but without consequences to the identity of the user.

The reverse of a anonymous system like 2channel or 4chan would provide the information seeker with more information about the information provider, and thus give the information seeker more clues in determining whether the information provider is worth tracking. A system that resembles this model would be Twitter, where a user is not obligated to follow any other user unless he wants to read updates. Therefore, a user on Twitter chooses the information he wants to follow, with the ability to stop following a user as soon as that user’s ability to provide relevant information lessens. Another interesting aspect of Twitter in relation to relevant information is the limitation of characters, which usually forces users to abbreviate any URLs they post. Because of that abbreviation, users may end up clicking on links to unknown destinations, relying on trust in the user who originally posted the link. I have found myself clicking on a message with just a TinyURL link with no indication where it goes, because I believe the user to be providing me with material relevant to my interests or needs.

The interesting thing about Twitter is that it is fundamentally hackable. Two simple experiments come to mind: 1) The creation of a fake person that provides users with relevant information, and 2) The existence of a real person that bombards users with utterly irrelevant information (by means, for example, of constant @replies, which are now always picked up by the @yourname aggregator). Both of these experiments play with the idea that information is moved around by people.

However, Twitter does not necessarily deal with memetic movement, particularly with regard to Internet memes. The problem, though, is that the definition of meme is slowly changing in the popular lexicon of the Internet. danah boyd recently posted a link on Twitter, commenting, “unbelievable must-view video: http://bit.ly/TnRKo (@ethanz notes that this is the kind of video meme that makes one proud of the interwebz)”. The link’s destination, a video on YouTube, does not seem to fit the concept of the Internet meme as a piece of popular culture that has been replicated and selected. However, it certainly has been repeatedly selected as an item of interest and the link to the video has been replicated across the Internet as people share it amongst friends (or strangers).

The video on YouTube, of Susan Boyle, a recent contestant on Britain’s Got Talent, recently swept the Web and has garnered almost ten million page views as of this writing. In less than thirty minutes this afternoon, I saw it jump over one million page views. The interesting thing about the video, though, is that it mirrors another video phenomenon that hit YouTube back in 2007, where Paul Potts sang an outstanding opera audition on the same show, in a similar lifestyle situation (he was a cell phone salesman; Susan is unemployed; both singers ended up outright shocking the audience). For meme researchers, the link between these videos is key, because it’s very difficult to match similar situations of instantaneous popularity online. Just as Paul Potts had taken the Internet by storm two years ago, so have Susan Boyle’s fans set up multiple fansites for her to spread her name around, widening her viewing audience. If it’s possible to track the people who move around this information on the Web, it would be a celebration for Internet researchers. Meme researchers: pay attention here!

The basic theory of this article states that a new layer of the Internet structure must be analyzed: the human element of the Web that moves information around. I believe that studies like meme research will become a new aspect of fan studies research, and I hope to begin research into that area as I continue my research into the American anime fandom this summer.

On top of the initial reactions in pure text (such as the video’s 2000+ comments as of the publication of this article), even Anime News Network’s Chicks on Anime picked up on the fandom’s backlash.

As much as anyone would like it, I’m not here to discuss the fandom or whatnot. Instead, my interest lies in a connection to a project that I’m helping out on and blogged about before: YouTomb, a project through the Students for Free Culture group at MIT where we look at the takedowns on YouTube.

The tale I will relate has already been told numerous times across the blogosphere. Little Kuriboh, a video producer on Yu-Gi-Oh!: The Abridged Series. He, as well as many other creators on YouTube, made spin-off productions of the Sakura-con commercial. The commercial seems to have caused quite a ruckus over at 4chan and even made it into the Encyclopedia Dramatica, which catalogues most of the memes and miscellaneous “creativity” that occurs on the 4chan boards. On top of the multiple mashups available on YouTube, LK decided to post his own version of the commercial, entitled GUHROOGAMESH!!!1, onto the video site, which parodied the commercial’s audio using clips from the Yu-Gi-Oh animated series. Eventually, the video was removed by YouTube.

Recently, a new version has popped up on YouTube:

However, if this is also eventually removed, Omonomono has indexed links to the video, one available on Nico Nico Douga (ニコニコ動画, known as the Japanese equivalent of YouTube) and another on MegaUpload (if you don’t have an account for the former).

Questioning why the video was taken down, YouTomb has named the cause (which of course can also be discovered when visiting LK’s video’s original page on YouTube, above): a copyright claim by Asia Northwest Cultural Education Association. On 25 March 2009, the video was taken down, a mere week after it was uploaded (18 March 2009).

The association’s website states: “The Asia Northwest Cultural Education Association (ANCEA) is a registered non-profit corporation. Every year, ANCEA participates in various cultural and educational events. Sakura-Con is ANCEA’s main event and realization of the ANCEA mission to educate about Asian Culture, with a focus on Japanese Animation.” Clearly the Sakura-con commercial, produced by voice actor Vic Mignogna (most famous for his American dubbing of Edward Elric from Full Metal Alchemist), is an attempt to gather people to the convention; however, it seems that LK saw it as a “miseducation” about Asian Culture, hence an inspiration for the parody.

As previously stated, the video was removed from YouTube via a DMCA claim. LK created an alternative video in reaction to the takedown, which he titled “1!!!HSEMAGOORHUG,” and uploaded it to YouTube. However, he later removed it, according to the video’s YouTube data, on his own terms. Ravegrl, over at WordPress, neatly records a set of screenshots of the second video, complete with the edits that LK made to the video to avoid re-censorship by the ANCEA. This second video clearly parodies even the first, such as one instance of subtitling: “This joke is no longer available due to copyright claim by Asia Northwest Cultural Education Association.” Some of the audio was muted to avoid a potential Content-ID check, replaced with different lines to continue the parody-of-a-parody, referencing the YouTube Poop genre of comedic (or random, given your taste) video mashups.

There are two critical points at which we must approach copyright for Little Kuriboh’s video parody.

Point 1: Parody versus Satire

Not well known is the distinction between parody and satire.

Merriam-Webster Online defines parody as “a literary or musical work in which the style of an author or work is closely imitated for comic effect or in ridicule” and satire as “a literary work holding up human vices and follies to ridicule or scorn.” Basically, the difference comes down to satire as criticism of something outside the original work (generally the human condition), while parody merely criticizes the original work (criticism, here, may be positive or negative, though in the case of satire it is usually the latter).

The problem with parody and satire is that the law distinctly distinguishes between the two. In their paper entitled The Satire/Parody Distinction in Copyright and Trademark Law — Can Satire Ever Be a Fair Use?, Juli Wilson Marshall and Nicholas J. Siciliano state, “The Court creates a fair use dichotomy between parody and satire. After concluding that parody could be considered fair use, the Court quickly qualified its holding: if the new work “has no critical bearing on the substance or style of the original composition, which the alleged infringer merely uses to get attention or to avoid the drudgery in working up something fresh,” the work is less transformative, and other fair use factors, such as whether the new work was sold commercially, loom larger. Id. at 580.”

Clearly LK’s “GUHROOGAMESH!!!1″ is a parody. It mimics the original audio while adding new audio clips and utilizes a new video style. The issue with the Sakura-con commercial, however, is that the video can be taken as a satire of the anime fandom in America. Therefore, LK’s parody video may be construed as a continuation of the assumed satire. Thus, a judge in the court could twist the DMCA claim to support the ANCEA, justifying the YouTube removal.

Point 2: Copyright versus Protection

In an email exchange between me and LK, he writes, “The truth is, they WERE out of line taking my video down in the first place for bogus reasons, but they later contacted me and explained the situation – that their site was being flooded with pornographic spam as an inadvertant result of my video’s content. They have told me that they liked the video, and if I made certain alterations, they would have no problem letting me put it back up. Being a reasonable person, I agreed to those conditions.”

As LK recounts, the issue of the takedown does not revolve around copyright, but instead a problem with “pornographic spam.” Although the audio content of the parody video and the associations with 4chan may have caused the spam, the fundamental matter in question of the YouTube removal revolves around the ANCEA’s use of a DMCA-related takedown when it clearly does not ultimately apply. I might argue that ANCEA had the right to file the claim, since LK did use Vic Mignogna’s voice-over at the end of his video, but eventually the work would be held up as a parody in a DMCA counter claim. Even LK shared my take on the issue: “I think if there’s a lesson here, it’s that a simple message explaining why the video was a problem was a LOT more effective than having the video deleted for silly reasons that don’t really apply.”

The concern for me, and probably the rest of the YouTomb team, is that a copyright claim can be used to remove a video from YouTube without an actual copyright violation. Currently YouTube allows for three methods of removal:
1) Terms of Service Violation
2) Content-ID Removal
3) DMCA Takedown Notice
(via the Electronic Frontier Foundation)

Avoiding of course the possibility that anime music videos and related media may violate copyright (Lawrence Lessig would argue no, given certain stipulations)… While we have ruled out #3 and stated the possbility of #2, why did YouTube not remove the video by quoting method #1? Taking a look at the transcript of LK’s first parody video (via Yu-Gi-Oh! Wikia), it might be argued that his material is not suitable for YouTube’s general user base. YouTube’s Community Guidelines reads, “YouTube is not for pornography or sexually explicit content. If this describes your video, even if it’s a video of yourself, don’t post it on YouTube. Also, be advised that we work closely with law enforcement and we report child exploitation. Please read our Safety Tips and stay safe on YouTube.” These guidelines reflect the law written in the Children’s Internet Protection Act (following the Communications Decency Act and the Child Online Protection Act), which was signed into law in 2000 and upheld by the Supreme Court in 2003. Clearly the statement is aimed at video and audio of pornographic situations to protect minors (in the sense of minors viewing and/or being recorded in the material), but it may be applied to the GUHROOGAMESH!!!1 video all the same. The real question remains: Why, or really how, does YouTube allow someone to claim copyright with a purpose not related to copyright? And how many other instances have there been?

It seems that for now the whole affair has died down, even over at 4chan (which Encyclopedia Dramatica describes as a joke thoroughly killed and buried). But this is one instance of a strange use of “the law” as YouTube sees it and, really, dictates it.