Many of you are likely to be familiar with WWDC, Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference. This is one of those places where you get a bunch of Apple product reveals and news updates that typically result in the press tripping all over themselves to bow at the altar of an iPhone 300 or whatever. The conference has been going on for decades and one enterprising YouTube account made a point of archiving video footage from past events so that any interested person could go back and see the evolution of the company.
Now, he’s going to be moving the videos over to the Internet Archive, but that will take time and I suppose there’s nothing keeping Apple from turning its copyright guns to that site as well. In the meantime, this treasure trove of videos that Apple doesn’t seem to want to bother hosting itself is simply gone.
Now, did Shanks have permission from Apple to post those videos? He says no. Does that mean that Apple can take copyright action on them? Sure does! But why is the question. Why are antiquated videos interesting mostly to hobbyists worth all this chaos and bad PR?
The videos in question were decades-old recordings of WWDC events.
Due to the multiple violations, not only were the videos removed, but Shanks’ YouTube channel has been disabled. In addition to losing the archive, Shanks also lost his personal YouTube account, as well as his YouTube TV, which he’d just paid for.
And so here we are again, with a large company killing off a form of preservation effort in the name of draconian copyright enforcement. Good times.
