<
https://www.techdirt.com/2025/03/19/youtube-apparently-unsure-if-shakespeare-is-in-the-public-domain/>
"One of the darker threads of
Walled Culture the book (free digital versions
available) is how complex copyright enforcement systems can be abused, for
example by sending Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) takedown requests
for material that is perfectly legal. A recent post on the
Public Citizen
blog offers an extreme example of this blight. Here’s the summary of what
happened:
When Julien Coallier sent a series of DMCA takedown requests contending that
various print publications of Shakespeare’s plays, and YouTube videos of
performances of those plays, infringed his purported copyright in those
works, it should have been treated as a bad joke. After all, Shakespeare’s
plays were published more than 400 years ago, and it is hard to imagine
the[m] as being anything but public domain. Yet not only did YouTube take
the demands seriously, it blew off those takedown targets who filed
counter-notifications and who asserted their right to publish plainly public
domain material.
There are several issues here. One concerns the cavalier manner in which
YouTube dealt with this situation – sadly, by no means an isolated incident. As
the
Public Citizen post explains, one of the video takedown victims was John
Underwood, who had posted on YouTube videos of Shakespeare performances by a
local non-profit group called Shakespeare by the Sea. When he received notice
that two of his videos had been removed because a takedown notice sent by
Coallier, Underwood followed the DMCA rules, and sent a counter-notice. He not
unnaturally assumed that would resolve such a clear-cut case, not least because
Shakespeare by the Seas assured him that it had not relied on Coallier’s
claimed version of the Shakespeare plays for their performances. But YouTube
ignored the official DMCA procedures and refused to acknowledge Underwood’s
counter-notice, or even forward it to Coallier. This was not a one-off: other
targets of Coallier’s take-down had also had their counter-notices ignored by
YouTube. So Underwood contacted Coallier directly:
In multiple emails, Coallier declined to explain why he thought Underwood’s
videos copied Coallier’s “translations” of Shakespeare’s plays, despite
being asked repeatedly. Instead, Coallier told them that Shakespeare is not
in the public domain because he had been able to register a copyright in
so-called English-language “translations” of every one of Shakespeare’s
plays. Coallier also claimed that he can charge a five percent royalty on
every performance."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
