Month: December 2017

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An Unusual Copyright Problem

I’ve been helping out a friend by doing post production for his film over the past few years. It’s a long story why it’s been years, so don’t ask 🙂

Five years ago I added in a piece of music to cover up a previous editor’s work and I was careful to make sure the licensing was OK. The song I used was Good Ol’ Country by Realism12 Productions Team and distributed with a CC BY-ND license. I got the song from the Internet Archive, a legitimate site so I never anticipated any copyright problem.

Today I was uploading another draft of the film when I noticed that a copyright violation claim had been placed on it for that piece of music. The claimant let it stay on YouTube but added monetization which is usually no big deal however in this case when finished the filmmaker would like to put it on DVD and maybe other web based video sites. With an alleged copyright violation claimed the film could never be copied anywhere else or on to media for family & friends.

Knowing this was going to be a problem I decided to investigate the issue more before giving up and removing the music. I found that the YouTube Content ID system thinks Good Ol’ Country is Walking the Horse by Marcello Micheli. Comparing the two songs I feel they are more similar to each other than My Sweet Lord  and He’s So Fine and I remember well the outcome of that copyright dispute.

So rather than try to deal with the copyright mess I opted to simply pull that song from the film.

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Huge Mistake by the Mozilla Firefox Team

They pushed this extension down to most users without warning.

LookingGlass01

Looks very suspicious and the first time I saw it I clicked Remove immediately. After all a weird extension name that I knew I hadn’t installed with an all caps Lewis Carol quote seems like some kind of malware. For a while I was thinking of uninstalling Firefox because if malware extensions are going to appear without any user action or notification it must be horribly insecure.

After investigating a bit and learning it was not malware simply a Firefox team error, so I clicked the More link.

LookingGlass02

Two observations, this is a handy list of the incompetent people who did this incredibly stupid act so other companies know not to hire them. Second observation it’s been out for a whole day and the Firefox team hasn’t fixed this yet, not good. Frankly if I didn’t love NoScript I’d dump Firefox since it is not any faster than Chrome in any usage or testing I’ve done.