McCain and YouTube

The McCain campaign has been having a lot of its videos taken down for DMCA violations, and complained to YouTube about it, saying that US Presidential Campaign Stuff deserved special treatment.

The response wasn't quite OMG YOUR OWN PETARD LOL, but it did make the following points:

• As a Senator in congress when the DMCA was passed, this is partially your fault.
  
• Lawyers can't agree on what fair use means, making it difficult for us to weigh claims.
  
• We have various pieces of content important to people all over the world, and don't privilege one user group over another if we can avoid it.
  

The closing was especially beautiful:

On a final note, we hope that as a content uploader you have gained a sense of some of the challenges we face everyday in operating YouTube. We look forward to working with Senator (or President) McCain on ways to combat abuse of the DMCA takedown process on YouTube, including, by way of example, strengthening the fair use doctrine, so that intermediaries like us can rely on this important doctrine with a measure of business certainty.

Lessig blogs on the issue.