The streamer may or may not be incompetent, but the copyright bot issue is real. I am not a lawyer, but my reading of http://images.chillingeffects.org/512.html section g.2.C is that they are legally NOT ALLOWED to put the material up until 10 days after receipt of a counter notice if they wish to maintain their DMCA safe harbor.

If my reading of that statute is right (I'd give that about even odds - but feel free to read it for yourself), even a competent streamer would have had to do the takedown. The statute does not say how quickly the takedown has to be, it merely says "acts expeditiously". So any competent provider will have an automated procedure, and once that procedure is triggered, that's it unless the copyright holder takes it back, or 10 days passes.

I just love the irony that it is Neil Gaiman who it happened to. He has long been a vocal proponent of copyright maximalism, and his positions on this are sufficiently extreme that I refuse to ever again buy anything that he has written.

Update: I've left the last paragraph untouched, but I decided to look for Neil Gaiman in his own words on copyright. And I ran across http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Qkyt1wXNlI which demonstrates that I'm remembering his "grumpy" period but he's since been educated that "online piracy" is not so bad.

I'm glad I found this out. I'll have to start buying his books again. (Yet another example of how I can form an opinion, and hold it for years after the facts behind that opinion stopped being true. If I didn't do this kind of follow-up research, I would have never known.)

That's only true if it was a DMCA takedown notice. If it were their only copyright detection systems - which I think it's more likely - it doesn't apply.

It was almost certainly an automatic takedown from Vobile, which they use (http://www.ustream.tv/blog/2010/07/16/launch-of-improved-mea...).

Not so sure about him changing his mind. A couple of weeks before the interview you posted, Gaiman was discussing the freedom of information on his blog. Pretty much all he had to say was to compare information to pizzas: "Pizza wants to be free. Concentrate on liberating pizza from evil pizzerias." This is so extremely shallow (or disingenuous) that I lost a lot of respect for the guy.

I think it's a fair statement for one big reason: this isn't an isolated case. You can find hundreds if not thousands of examples on YouTube of legitimate fair use being censored because it's more financially prohibitive to piss of lawyers who want to sue for everything than customers who want to use your service.

Could they have used a different streamer? Sure. Would this have still happened? Probably not but who knows. Does this represent a trend in copyright enforcement? Yep.

Any streamer becomes incompetent once takedown notices start arriving. Competent streamer becomes economically infeasible.

Every time you hear a song on the radio you should remember: this was brought to you by people who also happily destroy everything good in this world, everything worthy.

there are lots of good things on the radio that aren't related to the DRM-heavy corporate world, and always will be as long as I can help it. not every artist bows to the RIAA, just all of the ones you've been exposed to through their influence machine.

if it's the case for you that every time you hear a song on the radio you are reminded of the excesses of the intellectual property patrol, I humbly suggest changing the channel to your local non-commercial station. perhaps you'll hear something you like.

This might be true, I merely stated the default.

(Not everywhere in the world you can find something sufficiently independent, but you are guaranteed to find "intellectual property" there)

We're not talking about a high school football game here. Ustream must have known that they were carrying the Tony's, and should have had a human in the loop.

In my experiences, manual backoffice that lets a human in a loop is rarely implemented (at all), rarely works and is frequently broken.

This is because the development process stimulates features and automation and such a backoffice has to touch every system while bypassing many checks. It's a perrenial pain in the ass.

So I expect a lot of companies and processes to lack "Plan B" entirely.

Ustream would probably have at least one "special" stream up at any given time, so that code would get enough traffic to prevent it from rotting.

I think you're suggesting to choose a streamer that not only has bots identifying infringing content, but also is then reviewed by a pool of copyright-law-savvy humans for validation to prevent false positives. Not sure if that will scale.