Ustream Hugo Awards debacle

Ustream is a service where people can put up live and not so live events in video format on the internet. Ustream got the Hugo Awards contract. Right in the middle of the broadcast, the stream cut out because Ustream’s bots killed it due to copyright infringement. They blamed a third party company. Basically, these people were blocked for violating their own copyright.

The idea of automatically detecting and killing copyrighted material is flawed. There is no appeals process. There is no court to defend yourself in. The quickest way to get a YouTube video pulled is to complain that it violates someone’s copyright.

The system is broken. I cannot make money on my YouTube videos for two reasons. No one is watching and every one of my videos is flagged for copyright infringement. There is no copyright infringement going on. Still, I’m not able to participate because perhaps my voice sounds too much like some TV show or something. I cannot get an answer from YouTube. I do not want to loose my account so I do not monetize.