[Terretta]

Jeff Atwood was having this problem, and finally hosted it with us at Vive.ly. We're a commercial CDN that made Vive.ly as a side project "Dropbox for Video" for small businesses or people who want to feel comfortable owning their content, and we are big supporters of "fair use".

Atwood mentions his fair use issues here:

http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2012/07/but-you-did-not-per...

Granted, Vive.ly isn't free. There's a small cost for uploading, encoding, and storing the video, but that's a one time charge, and there's a nominal cost for bandwidth (we call it "minutes" to make it simple). But it's a wallet system, so if you don't use it you aren't dinged every month, and you own the content so you can run your own ads, name the site what you want or embed it anywhere.

We've gone toe to toe with big content trying to do take-downs of fair use content, and won. The DMCA doesn't have to be handled the way YouTube does it.

You can try it out through http://www.getvively.com/ which explains the platform or direct at http://www.vive.ly/ which is the platform itself.

You can use the invite code "hd4yc" to try it out with 600 minutes of video storage, and 12,000 minutes of delivery.

[magicalist]

You don't have to have a Content ID system, but you have to take down the content in the face of a correctly filled out takedown request, even if it's plainly fair use.

You also have to "replace the removed material and cease disabling access to it not less than 10, nor more than 14, business days following receipt of the counter notice, unless its designated agent first receives notice from the person who submitted the notification under subsection (c)(1)(C) that such person has filed an action seeking a court order to restrain the subscriber from engaging in infringing activity relating to the material on the service provider’s system or network."[1] (emphasis added)

It would be interesting to hear about what you guys have found effective in helping support fair use with vive.ly, but since the DMCA makes it essentially zero cost to spam takedown notices, even if only to achieve a chilling effect, the only tool you have (talking to the company posting the notice) is not very effective. You certainly (AFAIK) have no legal leverage as a safe harbored service provider.

[1] http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/512#g

[Terretta]

> You certainly (AFAIK) have no legal leverage as a safe harbored service provider.

This discredits your entire premise. We are a registered safe harbor service provider.

I've been in video since 98, and we've been hosting customer video since 2001. We've been to court over this, on behalf of our customers, and won. We know what we have to do and what we don't have to do. There's a lot of leeway for the provider in the DMCA.

The big guys partly want to automate everything, and partly are simply acknowledging they have a pirated content problem since anyone can upload anonymously and free, so their practices are far more anti-fair-use than the DMCA requires.

As a final note: you don't have to take down a given piece of content. You only "have" to take it down if you're afraid you'll lose on fair use and want to cover your ass.