YouTube Nabs Chilling Effects Prof.: Coincidence or Deep Chill?

In the rush to nab video pirates, YouTube purged user-content that had nothing to do with Viacom, except sharing some key words. Harvard’s Jim Moore complained this weekend that Viacom removed a video of him having dinner with friends (Laszlo Kovacks, he’s not). He ate at Redbone’s in Somerville, MA, and most likely Leon Redbone was the search term that nabbed his video. He got off with a warning:

Repeat incidents of copyright infringement will result in the deletion of your account and all videos uploaded to that account.

But Moore’s not some naif–he’s a Chilling Effects partisan, argues Donna Bogatin in her ZDNet blog. She points out the YouTube’s parent Google has funded the Stanford Center for Internet and Society, a Chilling Effect collaborator. Moore doesn’t blame YouTube or Google, but rather Viacom.

Moore’s rallying the troops for a class action against Viacom.

I can’t afford to do this alone, but perhaps now I am part of a “class,” as in “class action law suit?” Anyone else interested. This blog, by the way, is hosted at Harvard Law School Berkman Center for Internet & Society, so we should be able to get some local talent to help out.

FBLA can’t imagine that Moore deliberately ate ribs and posted the video just to lure Viacom into a trap.

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