14 DAY TRIAL // A US documentary filmmaker is desperately trying to have his film brought back to YouTube after what he considers an abusive and wrongful copyright claim filed by National German Library.
James K. Lambert reveals what he considers a horrific and unfair process on his blog, where he explains how YouTube was more than happy to side with a third-party music label that had filed a copyright claim on behalf of a fourth-party for a music song that, he says, has been in the public domain since the Second World War.
In 2006, Lambert had authored a documentary called "You don’t know Hitler," which he uploaded on several places online, including YouTube.
His 44-minute documentary details the horrors of the German Nazi regime and also includes a passage where you could hear the Nazi anthem, a song called Horst Wessel Lied.
National German Library files questionable copyright claim
This past week, the National German Library acted through BR Enter Music, a German music label, and sent YouTube a copyright claim asking Google to take down the documentary because of the song.
Lambert argues that the German state and the Nazi regime lost all copyrights to that song and other Nazi material after World War II, when both the UK and the US abolished any recognition of Nazi copyrights.
The filmmaker claims this hasn't stopped the German state from imposing its sense of property over material that was not created by government officials, nor had it ever been bought by them, being material left in the public domain after the Nazi party's dissolving.
Author claims it was fair use
Lambert also claims that,even if by any legal loophole the National German Library had managed to acquire the copyrights to this 87-year-old historical material, his film still falls under what international copyright laws consider "fair use."
The documentary maker says he only used about one minute of the song, he didn't try to monetize the videos through ads, and he only used it for educational purposes, to better depict that time and era.
YouTube sided with the music label, and took down the video, giving Lambert a first copyright infringement strike on his account.
Counter complaint process is not fair
When it came time to file a counter complaint, Lambert says that YouTube was limiting the number of characters he could type. This is his entire counter notification:
“ In my expert opinion, as a documentarian and a professor of film, with an MFA in my field, I am confident that my documentary should not have been removed. I have composed a lengthy argument 1) Explain why Nazi Propaganda is in the Public Domain, and 2) Why, even if it was not in the Public Domain, everything I have done in this film meets the four criteria commonly used to define Fair Use in U.S. Courts. Unfortunately, YouTube’s ridiculous system limits the number of characters I can type here. ”
But this was not the biggest problem in this process, which the filmmaker considers incredibly flawed, as Lambert explains himself."So it’s up to YouTube to decide if my incredibly truncated response is even sent to BR Enter Music, and then it’s unclear what BR Enter can or cannot do in their 'response' or what rights I have in this one sided process," Lambert writes on his site. "What a load of [removed]! A big, stinky, corporate, bureaucratic [removed]."
In the meantime, the filmmaker is redirecting users who want to watch the film to Vimeo. The same Nazi anthem song is available on countless of other YouTube profiles, in its entirety, often festering with anti-semitic comments underneath.
