So much for Internet freedom

by Yeoh Siew Hoon

A funny thing happened to me after I returned from the opening of the Beijing Olympics.

I had been busy taking videos of the performances with my newly-acquired VADO, a new video camera from Singapore’s Creative Technologies, that is as nifty to look at (mine is hot pink) as it is to use.

With so much going on in the Bird’s Nest that night, it was hard to juggle between my gadgets – still photos just could not do justice to the spectacle of the night and so I was busier with my VADO than I was with my camera and mobile phone.

Excited by all the footage I had captured, I immediately imported the videos into my laptop and uploaded the finale footage of gymnast Li Ning doing that flying stunt round the rim of the Bird’s Nest roof onto my Youtube account.

It took several minutes as it always does, but it worked.

Within an hour or so, I received an email from YouTube, saying “A YouTube partner made a copyright claim on one of your videos”, and advised me that “your video is no longer available because NBC Universal (Sports) has chosen to block it”.

The notification read, “NBC Universal (Sports) claimed this content as a part of the YouTube Content Identification program. YouTube allows partners to review YouTube videos for content to which they own the rights. Partners may use our automated video/audio matching system to identify their content, or they may manually review videos.”

It then warned, “Repeat incidents of copyright infringement will result in the suspension of your account and all videos uploaded to that account.”

This worries me somewhat. Call me naive or what but as someone who regularly posts blogs and videos on social networking sites to share with my friends, I have taken for granted the freedom to post what I like, especially what I have shot myself, provided it is not malicious or has ill intent against persons or individuals.

I had posted the video in good faith. To then be notified that a video I took myself of an event I saw myself has infringed on the copyright of a commercial company, which is obviously monitoring user content by a site or “community” to which I belong, is slightly off-putting.

It smacks of Big Brother, the very thing we think the Internet is not, and it makes me wonder how much of what I share out there exposes me to potential danger I am as yet unaware of.

User generated content and rich media are being hailed as the new wave of the Internet. On Facebook, we share our private lives with everyone.

We tell people what we are doing at any time and if we forget to do so, “they” ask us, “What are you doing right now?” like they really care.We post photos of ourselves in poses and positions we would otherwise not share in public and our friends are free to comment on them.

We post videos of our travels – things which, in the past, we could only inflict on family and close friends we now unleash onto the whole world.We do all this because the Internet and the new wave of social sites encourage us to do so.

And now we find it may not be as free or fun as we think it is.

Alas, the virtual world to which we thought we could escape is more and more mirroring the real world.

Catch up with Yeoh Siew Hoon at The Transit Café