On March 22, the Electronic Frontier Foundation filed suit in federal court for declaratory relief. The EFF sought judgment that a video posted on YouTube, entitled "Stop the Falsiness," be protected from Comedy Central's parent company (Viacom), which was demanding it be removed from the web.
The video is a parody of prior political satire. Taking aim at "The Colbert Report" TV show (whimsically pronounced Col-bear Repor), the video attacks faux journalist Stephen Colbert's vigorous campaign to demand "truthiness" in fake journalism. "Truthiness" – according to dictionary.com – is a satirical term regarding something the speaker knows with certainty with no regard for evidence, logic, analysis or actual fact. Like weapons of mass destruction. The video includes commentator Al Franken, who accuses Colbert of "in fact" spreading "falsiness."
Example: Rather than give credence to Al Gore's film on global warming, Colbert blames glaciers for our troubles from nature. You place a baby in front of one, and within a century the glacier would crush the baby, he notes. Franken calls him to task. While Colbert's argument is "technically true," Colbert fails to point out that, after 100 years, the baby would be an old man and would simply have shuffled away on his walker. That's wolfish falsiness, dressed up in sheepful truthiness clothiering. In other words, one can attack truthiness with irrelevant additional "facts," to turn the truthiness into falsiness.
What was my point? Oh, the lawsuit. It seems that "Stop the Falsiness" got caught up in a bigger, titanic struggle involving the one billion dollar suit filed by Viacom against YouTube for copyright infringement. (See Passarelli article.) As part of a campaign of written demands by Viacom involving YouTube's web hosting of -- wait for it -- 160,000 video clips derived from Viacom, this one got caught in the, well, the net.
The demand letters, known as takedown notices, must conform to Section 512 of the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA), telling the internet service provider (ISP) such as YouTube that it has allowed the posting of infringing material and must take it down. By complying, the ISP avoids infringement liability. (And don't get me started on "innocent" copyright infringement.) The posting party can then write a countermanding letter to the ISP saying "don't do it; I didn't infringe." The material then stays up on the website, unless the copyright owner files suit.
Here, there was a quick resolution. It was a clear parody of the copyrighted material, which can legally copy the original material to make fun of it. Viacom apologized, saying it was a "mere oversight" that its enforcement service claimed under penalty of perjury that the material was infringing. In the takedown letter, the enforcement service had sworn to tell the truthiness, the whole truthiness, and ….
Which just goes to show, the truthiness hurts, both writer and victim. But Viacom's takedown letter, though truthy, turned out to be falsey in EFF's eyes. They viewed the attempt as a perverse effort to stifle the First Amendment. ("Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor, save when thy neighbor commiteth video adultery.")