{"id":176004,"date":"2020-10-02T07:22:00","date_gmt":"2020-10-02T12:22:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2020\/10\/02\/today-in-ip-law-abuse\/"},"modified":"2020-10-02T07:22:00","modified_gmt":"2020-10-02T12:22:00","slug":"today-in-ip-law-abuse","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2020\/10\/02\/today-in-ip-law-abuse\/","title":{"rendered":"Today in IP Law Abuse"},"content":{"rendered":"
Wannabee electric vehicle startup Nikola is issuing take-down notices to prevent people from reporting on its own fraudulent video<\/a>. <\/div>\n

The posted a video of their new “Truck” driving down the road, but it turned out that there was no propulsion system.<\/p>\n

They just let it roll down hill and made it look like it was powered with camera angles:<\/p>\n

Nikola has issued copyright-takedown notices targeting critics on YouTube who used clips of the promotional video in which a Nikola prototype truck was seen rolling down a hill. <\/p>\n

Nikola last month admitted<\/a> that the promotional video of a supposedly functional Nikola One electric truck moving along a highway actually consisted of the company’s vehicle rolling downhill. This week, Nikola “forced the removal of several critical videos from YouTube, saying they infringed its copyright by using footage from the company,” including the truck-rolling-downhill video, the Financial Times reported yesterday<\/a>. <\/p>\n

Sam Alexander is one of at least two financial commentators who had videos removed by Google subsidiary YouTube at Nikola’s request. He says that four of his videos were taken down.<\/p>\n

“The claim is from when I showed 30 seconds of their Nikola One in Motion footage, which is what they put on Twitter and it’s of their Nikola One rolling down the hill,” Alexander said in a YouTube video<\/a> he posted Wednesday.<\/p>\n

\u2026\u2026\u2026<\/p>\n

“Right now my main concern is that Nikola is using copyright strikes to silence their critics,” Alexander told the Financial Times. Another YouTuber named Tom Nash<\/a> “was required to take down three videos that featured criticism of Nikola,” including one that used footage of the moving truck, and has appealed YouTube’s decision, the Financial Times article said.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Meanwhile, both Nikola and Youtube are pointing fingers at each other, but my money is on Nikola <\/p>\n

\u2026\u2026\u2026<\/p>\n

A Nikola statement sent to Ars and other media outlets tries to portray YouTube as the party that initiated the video-removal process. “YouTube regularly identifies copyright violations of Nikola content and shares the lists of videos with us,” a Nikola spokesperson told Ars. “Based on YouTube’s information, our initial action was to submit takedown requests to remove the content that was used without our permission. We will continue to evaluate flagged videos on a case-by-case basis.” <\/p>\n

YouTube offered a different description, saying that Nikola simply took advantage of the Copyright Match Tool<\/a> that’s available to people in the YouTube Partner Program. <\/p>\n

“Nikola has access to our copyright match tool, which does not automatically remove any videos,” YouTube told the FT. “Users must fill out a copyright removal request form, and when doing so we remind them to consider exceptions to copyright law. Anyone who believes their reuse of a video or segment is protected by fair use can file a counter-notice.”<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

This is why there should be real, and severe, penalties for misuse of the take-down process in law.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Wannabee electric vehicle startup Nikola is issuing take-down notices to prevent people from reporting on its own fraudulent video. The posted a video of their new “Truck” driving down the road, but it turned out that there was no propulsion system. They just let it roll down hill and made it look like it was …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[520,368,575,387,428,471],"class_list":["post-176004","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","tag-copyright","tag-corruption","tag-fraud","tag-hypocrisy","tag-ip","tag-transportation"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/176004"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=176004"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/176004\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=176004"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=176004"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=176004"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}