Remember That Thing About Copyright Yesterday?

The one about the Hugo Awards’ UStream being shut-down by copyright protection-bots?

It gets worse.

So the YouTube livestream of the Democratic National Convention, which was hosted on both YouTube and BarackObama.com was pulled thanks to copyright claims.

It was embarrassing enough when something similar happened to NASA during the Mars rover landing, but this has now become an issue directly impacting the function of our democracy. Whoever you might favor in the election, it’s just not cool for random pieces of software to block access to the Internet “airwaves”.

YouTube is different from UStream in that it doesn’t offer premium paid accounts for its users, and wants to be seen more and more as a replacement for broadcast television. How embarrassing must this be for the Google-owned company to be held hostage by a system of spurious claims that obliterate their credibility as a primary news service?

Shoot first, ask copyright questions later has to go.