Fight For The Future

The only honest cable company in the world just got censored.

This video is hilarious. And true. But if you're in Canada you can't watch it.

That's because it's been censored on YouTube thanks to a bogus "defamation" request we can only assume came from one of the monopolistic cable companies that the video is poking fun at.

Corporations shouldn't be able to remove political videos from YouTube just because they don't like what they're saying.

Update (from TechDirt): YouTube has now reinstated the video, telling us: "Sometimes we make the wrong call. When it's brought to our attention that a video has been removed or blocked mistakenly, we act quickly to reinstate it." It's still not clear who made the original defamation claim, unfortunately.

Tell YouTube: "Don't censor political videos just because corporations ask you to."

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Awesome! Now share.

The best way to combat censorship is to share the $#!% out of anything they try to block. So get to it!

Oh, and guess what? Censorship doesn't work!

One of the most common side effects of misguided internet censorship is that it often gains more attention for the censored content than it would have already had -- as evidenced by the fact that the story about this video hit the front page of reddit.

Plus, here's a link where folks in Canada can still view the video easily.

Mike Masnick over at TechDirt has this analysis:

This raises all sorts of questions, none of them good. There's nothing defamatory in the video at all. I don't care how ridiculous Canada's defamation laws are (and they are kind of ridiculous), this video isn't defaming anything. It doesn't name a particular cable company, and it's clearly parody anyway. It makes no statements of fact about any particular cable company anyway. Furthermore, it's clearly focused on the US, not Canada (at 24 seconds it shows a map of the US). So, it seems like an interesting question to know who made the defamation claim against the video? Furthermore, this is the first time I've seen that particular error message on a YouTube video (it's usually a copyright claim). I'm curious as to how carefully YouTube reviews the defamation claims and if the counternotice process is the same as with a copyright claim. Either way, it seems like whoever decided to file such a claim on the video basically decided to censor a video because they don't like what it says... and, of course, that's only going to serve to give it that much more attention (yet again)."