Once again this blogger makes Cracked.com ("5 Famous Online Copyright Crusaders Who Are Total Hypocrites")

At this point I've lost count. It's at least the fourth or fifth time that my shenanigans have landed me on popular humor site Cracked.com. This latest appearance comes courtesy of an article titled "5 Famous Online Copyright Crusaders Who Are Total Hypocrites".  With a title like that I just had to scan and tear it down and analyze it to see what I was doing that...

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The Knight Shift is standing up for The Sideshow Coalition

About three years ago, this blog's eclectic proprietor had to learn awful fast and hard about Viacom and its dispute with YouTube. If you recall, if you worked it out in your head then logically Viacom was accusing me of violating my own copyright after Viacom took my work without permission and used it for a show on VH1, and then accused ME of copyright infringement for posting the clip of that onto YouTube.Well, I won that case as best I can imagine...

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Google accuses Viacom of secretly uploading its own videos to YouTube (WOW!!!)

This is gonna be a helluva fun thing to watch. I'm getting the popcorn ready even now...Media conglomermonster Viacom - which has tied up the video hosting service in litigation for the past three years over "copyright infringement" - is now said to have been secretly uploading its own videos to the Google-owned website!From the statement on the official YouTube blog, pertaining to court documents made public earlier today...Because content owners...

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AGAIN?! Looks like I'll be fighting Comcast now...

So I got back from a delightful day of various and sundry stuff (including finally seeing Avatar, review or something coming soon) and I started catching up on an inordinate amount of stuff that had piled up in my absence.Well, there were two e-mails from YouTube in the e-mail account I use for KWerky Productions. And both of them said that the clip I had posted two years ago of E!'s The Soup had been yanked for "copyright infringement".It's an...

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I'm speaking at SPARKcon in Raleigh this evening!

Just a friendly reminder that if you want to meet the blogger/proprietor of The Knight Shift in person and you're going to be in the Raleigh/Durham today, that you're in luck!I will be at Artspace, located at 201 East Davie St in Raleigh at 5:45 p.m. this afternoon during the filmSPARK track of SPARKcon: a grassroots-organized four-day festival celebrating individual creativity...

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Meet "The Dude Who Took Down Viacom" at SPARKcon in Raleigh!

That commercial is going to haunt me for the rest of my life, isn't it? :-PSPARKcon is a grassroots-organized four-day festival in Raleigh celebrating individual creativity around the Triangle area and throughout North Carolina. This will be the fourth annual event and this year SPARKcon will be held September 17-20. And I've been invited to speak that Friday night about...

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Viacom v. Knight at the Citizen Media Law Project

A few days ago was the one year anniversary of that very strange situation between multi-billion dollar multimedia conglomerate Viacom (owner of CBS, Paramount, Comedy Central and many other brands) and Yours Truly. If you're fairly new to this joint here's my first post about what happened and here's the list of all the news articles that I could find about it. Long story...

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Judge orders YouTube to surrender ALL user history to Viacom

A judge has ordered YouTube to hand over ALL the history of its users - including videos watched and IP addresses - to Viacom, as part of Viacom's "infringement" lawsuit against YouTube and its owner Google.I first found the story on Slashdot, which is reflecting a lot of outrage at the judge's ruling.Since it's already been established that Viacom has STOLEN video from ME, perhaps I should sue and have a judge also give me YouTube's user history...

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"Dear Sumner Redstone, from the guy you STOLE video from ..."

In spite of what I said about no hard feelings, there ain't no way that I'm gonna let this one slide...Many of you no doubt remember what happened between me and Viacom several months ago, regarding the first TV commercial from my 2006 school board campaign.To quickly recap: months after the election, Viacom's network VH1 chose to use my commercial for a segment of its show...

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Interview with Jesse Brown on CBC Radio One's SEARCH ENGINE about the Viacom/YouTube mess

Search Engine hosted by Jesse Brown is a show on CBC Radio One ("CBC" being the Canadian Broadcasting Company). It's about issues pertaining to the Internet and it's heard by our good friends all across the Great White North. Last week Jesse phoned all the way down here to Reidsville, North Carolina and interviewed me about my recent situation with Viacom and the supposed...

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The "Star Wars" school board commercial is 1 year old today

It was one year ago today - on October 6th, 2006 - that the now-(in)famous first commercial from my campaign for Rockingham County Board of Education started broadcasting on WGSR in Reidsville...I had just finished it that morning, and while the video was doing the final render I ran out to find Debbie Moore so that I could give her the check for a month's worth of airtime. Then I got home, burned it onto a CD and drove it over to WGSR and handed...

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YOUTUBE/VIACOM AFTERMATH - Part 2: The DMCA Counter-Notification Claim

Because a lot of people have expressed interest in this, and because I haven't been able to see any reason to withhold this info at this point, here is the Digital Millennium Copyright Act counter-notification claim that I submitted to YouTube.(And in case you don't know what this is about, here's the original post about my situation with Viacom over a YouTube clip that I had uploaded and here's the post about its resolution.)It all started with...

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YOUTUBE/VIACOM AFTERMATH - Part 1: The Media Exposure

It took quite awhile longer than I'd expected. This thing got around in a big way, what with The Wall Street Journal and Yahoo! and Slashdot and Ars Technica and seemingly a jillion more outlets that covered it. Lots of people wanted to weigh in on this and for sake of objectivity I've tried my best to include everyone that I could find that raised valid arguments about this issue, regardless of which side they took.So here ya go: a (more or less)...

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VIACOM SITUATION UPDATE: YouTube has restored my clip

It will be two weeks ago tomorrow since YouTube notified me that it had pulled the clip I had uploaded from VH1's show Web Junk 2.0 featuring my first school board commercial. VH1's parent company Viacom had considered it an infringement of copyright and requested that YouTube to act accordingly. Later that same day I filed a counter-notification claim with YouTube, arguing that I should be entitled to use the clip because it was a derivative product...

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Something I'll never post on this blog and actually MEAN it...

"Look for the complete and factual account of the Viacom incident on this web page in the near future. The account has been delayed due to pending litigation."Yes, even now, I can't resist having some fun with this situation :-)There is a massive update coming on this, and hopefully in the next few days. In the meantime, if you're a reasonably long-term reader of this blog you'll no doubt "get" the above jo...

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Quick update on the Viacom situation

Well, this has certainly been an interesting past 48 hours.There's been lots of activity happening on this end about the deal with Viacom and me: how they claimed I infringed on their copyright after posting a video on YouTube that Viacom made by infringing on my copyright.It's evoked quite a bit more controversy than I had expected.May be able to talk about this more in the next few da...

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More Viacom "infringement" insanity: Now lip-syncing to Prince is out

The story about my issue with Viacom and how they made YouTube take down a clip that I'd posted of a VH1 show which was already made with my own material is starting to get around. Now comes word of another crazy clip takedown on Viacom's orders...Kenya Allmond received notification from YouTube yesterday that one of her videos had been pulled for "copyright infringement". The offending material? A clip of her boyfriend lip-syncing to "Kiss" by...

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This blog has been Slashdotted! (And guess why?)

So I just got online for the day and guess what I saw at the top of the page on Slashdot:It's the story about how Viacom claims I'm infringing on their copyright after they infringed on MY copyright! I just took a look at the original post that I made about this and in the last little while it's gone from 4 comments when I went to bed last night, to 20. I haven't read those...

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Viacom hits me with copyright infringement for posting on YouTube a video that Viacom made by infringing on my own copyright!

UPDATE 09-12-2007 12:29 am EST: YouTube has restored the clip"Chutzpah" is a Yiddish word meaning "unbelievable gall or audacity". An example of it would be the story of the kid who murders both of his parents, then throws himself on the mercy of the court on the grounds that he’s an orphan.That's chutzpah. So is this: multimedia giant Viacom is claiming that I have violated...

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