Before we were so rudely interrupted, we were about to write some more about the issues around the BBC’s takedown of this site’s YouTube channel. Because while we got a very respectable five-and-a-half minutes on Good Morning Scotland earlier today, you never have the time on radio or TV to say everything you want to.
Incidentally, we get the impression – nothing more solid than that – from a number of sources that BBC Scotland are somewhat out of the loop over the whole affair, and the impetus to silence Wings has actually come from London, which is slightly scarier. But aside from that, there are a number of really rather disturbing aspects to the situation.
You can hear the full interview here:
(Good Morning Scotland, BBC Radio Scotland, 1 August 2018)
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The closest thing to a curveball in it was the claim by well-known Scottish Labour goon Cllr Dr Professor Scott Arthur that he had in fact been treated in exactly the same way by the BBC over his YouTube channel.
But that’s quite demonstrably not true. We had no contact from the BBC whatsoever (and indeed we still haven’t). Arthur’s channel is still accessible on YouTube, although it’s been drastically reduced in size from over 2,000 videos to just 28 live ones.
That’s because the rest have been voluntarily locked down as “Private”.
While that means that those clips can’t be seen by anyone except Arthur himself, the channel is still live, he still has full access to it and all its data and lists, and he can upload new videos whenever he likes.
This is the case despite the fact that hundreds and hundreds of his videos (there are 236 on the SNP alone) are apparently subject to BBC copyright claims, compared to just 13 of ours. Yet we and Peter Curran were given no opportunity to lock down the contested clips on our channels and keep the rest of the channel alive.
That can only reasonably mean one of two things – either (1) someone at the BBC tipped Arthur the wink to lock the videos before the Corporation filed its complaint with YouTube, or (2) YouTube are giving him special preferential treatment for some reason that we can’t explain, allowing him to keep his channel despite hundreds of copyright strikes while we lose ours for a dozen.
It looks more probable that it was (1) than (2). But that doesn’t explain the case of Old Queen TV, a channel seemingly part of The Spectator (certainly using their “Coffee House” logo, and the Spectator offices are on Old Queen Street), which as we write this post this morning is still absolutely stuffed with BBC political clips.
And it doesn’t explain the Lib Dems channel, which is the same:
And it’s fine for the Scottish Conservatives:
And it’s fine for UKIP (even for clips more than nine minutes long):
And it’s fine for some other UKIP dude with a Jordan Peterson fetish, who even imposes his own watermarks over BBC videos to claim “ownership”:
And it’s fine for “VoteNO2014UKOK”:
And it’s fine for “British Fight Back” plugging Britain First:
And it’s fine if you’re VH1tunes showing Nick Griffin on Question Time in amongst a load of Dizzee Rascal and Bananarama videos for some reason:
Or indeed if you’re anyone who wants to show Nick Griffin on the BBC:
It still seems to be just pro-indy channels that have had the Big Hammer treatment.
But what of the bigger issues? The transience of news is in stark contrast to most other broadcasting. A huge amount of the BBC’s current affairs output either isn’t available on iPlayer at all, or only for a very brief period – an episode of Reporting Scotland, for example, is up for 24 hours or less, and the same applies to other regional news shows and indeed to the main six o’clock bulletin. So if anything important gets said on them, it vanishes down the memory hole almost immediately.
Other BBC programming generally gets a month or more on the service. And in news especially it would seem important for the public to have an indisputable record of what politicians have claimed, promised, or changed their position on six times that week.
Indeed, it’s hard to justify EVER deleting news shows from the iPlayer. It’s not like they’re ever going to want to sell a DVD box set of The Best Of Sunday Politics East Midlands for money. We can’t imagine the BBC is short of hard-drive space, and it seems unlikely that they’d hog a lot of bandwidth – how many people on any given day are going to be glued to old episodes of Scotland 2016, when only about 500 people bothered watching them even when they were current?
So why not just have news shows permanently available in the archive for the handful of nerds who’d ever want to see them? Why the indecent haste to hide them away the minute after they’re broadcast so that nobody can check up on Ruth Davidson’s 26 different positions on Brexit?
(Yeah, okay, we may have answered our own question there.)
Of our 13 rogue clips, the least defensible (and the only non-news one) was the one of New Order performing a stunning rendition of their minor 1982 hit “Temptation” at Glastonbury in 2016. We’d say you could construct at least a decent argument for an exemption under the “review and criticism” purposes, especially as it was only a single song from a set over an hour long, but it’s a weaker case than the politics clips.
So the BBC will have treated everyone else uploading it the same, right?
Oh. Not so much, as it turns out. We were able to track down two other versions of it on YouTube instantly, both on channels which appear not to have licenced any rights to it, and both of which feature the BBC’s watermarked broadcast of the band’s entire Glastonbury set – not just a single song – but which the BBC seem entirely happy to leave in place. (And even though they’ve had 300,000 views between them, compared to about 100 views on ours because we never advertised it anywhere.)
Seems it’s only vile nats who aren’t allowed to share Barney’s dad dancing.
This entire affair quite frankly stinks to high heaven. The BBC have operated a plainly partisan policy, observably applying different rules and procedures to people with different political viewpoints. YouTube appear to have actively colluded with them rather than being neutral, and have even suspended their normal conflict-resolution system just for Wings Over Scotland for no obvious reason, even though our account was until then in spotlessly good standing.
YouTube’s own website says it “isn’t able to mediate rights ownership issues”. Yet it’s done exactly that in our case, deciding by itself that we don’t have the necessary rights and bypassing both the BBC and the courts.
The BBC is a publicly-funded and theoretically publicly-accountable organisation, yet it refuses to appear on its own programmes to explain its actions to the people who own it. (It’s going to sound rather hollow the next time it pointedly says that no Scottish Government minister was available for interview.)
We’re going to take this one as far as it’ll go, folks.
