For those of you who didn’t catch the media review section of today’s John Beattie show on Radio Scotland, where the Wings/YouTube copyright case was discussed at length, here’s a compilation of the relevant sections. It’s quite the listen.
The BBC’s official statement is below in full.
Well, this story moves fast.
What that means is that, at least for now, our YouTube channel is back (Back! BACK!), minus the 13 videos complained about by the BBC on copyright grounds. The situation is once again that Corporation has 14 business days to file a formal court challenge, and unless it does so the channel will be reinstated in full.
Meanwhile, here’s how the Streisand Effect works.
Before we were so rudely interrupted, we were about to write a little more about the issues around the BBC’s takedown of this site’s YouTube channel. Because while we got a very respectable five-and-a-half minutes on Good Morning Scotland earlier today, you never have the time on radio or TV to say everything you want to.
Incidentally, we get the impression – nothing more solid than that – from a number of sources that BBC Scotland are somewhat out of the loop over the whole affair, and the impetus to silence Wings has actually come from London, which is slightly scarier. But aside from that, there are a number of really rather disturbing aspects to the situation.
Well, that’s curious. No sooner had I got back home from the BBC Radio studio in Bath after going on today’s Good Morning Scotland to discuss the Corporation’s closing down of my YouTube channel than I found a new email from YouTube in my inbox.
No explanation of any kind was offered for the decision – we can’t imagine what has led YouTube to conclude all by itself that we don’t have the “necessary rights” – and it appears to let the BBC entirely off the hook from having to decide whether to launch a court case or concede the fair use of the clips.
We’ll be investigating further to see what we can find out.
So this morning, four days after our entire YouTube channel was deleted at the behest of the BBC, and after days of wrestling with YouTube’s shambolic robot-staffed admin maze, we finally managed to get an email out of them with the full list of what the BBC had complained about.
(If you should ever find yourself in a similar situation, we can recommend contacting @TeamYouTube on Twitter, who appear to be actual human people and can eventually prod the robots into action.)
The signatory was a London-based BBC lawyer, who’d plucked 13 videos apparently at random from the hundreds on our channel and decided to whine about them (citing US copyright law, rather than UK) up to four and a half years later.
So what we only suspected is now official. In a response to The National, the BBC have confirmed that they were behind the termination of this site’s YouTube channel.
We have to admit, that “irrespective of the political views” line is a classic.
Large sections of the Scottish media today trot out Variant #26 of the fortnightly “NHS SCOTLAND CRISIS!” story, namely the targets for A&E waiting times. The BBC, for example, goes with this:
While the Sunday Mail runs a remarkably similar piece except with more Anas Sarwar.
And that’s all fair enough – it’s a legitimate news story. But what’s really odd about it is that both of the articles leave out what you might imagine would be a rather crucial piece of information.
We happened to be looking at a couple of old articles this morning, and noticed that some of them had blank spaces where videos should be.
We didn’t think much of it at first, because people do sometimes delete old videos or shut down their accounts, but when we checked one of them we discovered it was hosted on the Wings Over Scotland channel.
Or rather, it USED to be, because our YouTube channel isn’t there any more.
The BBC front page headline for this is actually just the alarming-sounding “Scottish prescription costs rise by 25%”, without even the qualifier about the timespan.
It’s worse than that, though.
So we stumbled, we thought, across a random Twitter idiot this morning.
Alert readers may have spotted a flaw or two in that claim.
From time to time in our Panelbase polls we like to test Scotland’s opinion of its media, since that’s the main focus of our website, and our newest poll was one such time. It found that Scotland’s preferred broadcaster for political coverage was… Channel 4.
The station scored a net +23 rating with respondents, higher than STV (+19), with BBC Scotland trailing in last but still on +16 overall.
The BBC was the only one which had a notable difference in perception between Yes and No voters. C4 got +25 from Nos and a very similar +21 from Yessers, STV was closer still at +20 vs +19, but the BBC had a sizeable gap: just +6 from independence supporters (which is still startlingly high), but a thumping +23 from Unionists.
All broadcasters in Scotland are required by Ofcom rules to be neutral and balanced. We suppose that two out of three more or less managing it isn’t bad.
Wings Over Scotland is a thing that exists.
