By Will Sturgeon, 29 August 2006 17:10
NEWS
The UK cabinet Office has been forced to pull one of the public service videos it published on YouTube due to copyright violation.
A video called Transformational Government can no longer be viewed on the site, instead users get a box of red text stating: "This video has been removed at the request of copyright owner COI Television because its content was used without permission."
COI Television is actually part of the Cabinet Office and the further irony of the video being about transformational government was not lost on one critic.
A spokesman for independent body Public Sector Forums, told silicon.com: "The COI is part of the Cabinet Office. So it looks like the Cabinet Office's initiative has fallen at the first hurdle and ironically, it's thanks to a lack of joined-upness between parts of its own ministry."
The embarrassing case of the missing video comes just a week after the Cabinet Office was praised for embracing modern means of communicating through the web.
A Cabinet Office spokeswoman told silicon.com: "We said that this is a small scale trial or experiment. Trials are meant to flush out a whole range of issues precisely such as these. Rights for online distribution are notoriously complex. We are in discussions to rectify the situation."
Comments
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1. Richard
How sad, but I hope that this prompts better, simpler, less restrictive UK & EU copyright legislation; not just even more rights for the media moguls and more work for their lawyers.
2. Chris Goodman
If the supposedly very expert civil servants who man the cabinet office can't get it right then it is no wonder that the remainder (just look at the Home Office foul ups and the messes at DWP) are proving incompetent.
All these problems should have been thought through and solved BEFORE the operation went on line.
And the COI should ensure that any tax payer funded propaganda productions have no restrictions or limitations in their use, even if it means they are produced abroad.
3. Simon Cox
Someone from the Cabinet office must have read my comment on the last Silicon story about this! You Tubes terms and conditions state that any files uploaded to thier webspace become the property of YouTube - effectivley allowing them to do what they like with the footage. As i pointed out at teh time this is effectivly giving away the nations assets and as embarresing as it might have been to remove the fottage it was the right decision. My guess is that there was a marketing/PR agency behind the idea of putting it up there in the first place - as a cool thing to do. Governments are not meant to be cool - just efficient.
4. Richard
Property of YouTube?
According to my hasty reading of YouTube's Ts&Cs, the copyright is NOT transferred to YouTube.
Anyone posting material to YouTube grants YouTube a worldwide licence to distribute the material, but retains copyright.
The web-site couldn't work without such a licence.
However, having made something available for free via YouTube, it would be very hard to charge for it elsewhere.