The Hugo Awards have been presented annually since 1955, and are considered by many to be the most prestigious awards for Science Fiction. They’re named after Hugo Gernsback, who founded the American SF magazine, Amazing Stories, in 1926. This year they were awarded at the 71st World Science Fiction Convention, which was streamed live on the Internet. That is, it was streaming until it was shut down by a copyright take-down robot. The ‘bot, which was being used by Ustream TV to monitor its content, detected copyrighted material in the stream. That would have been the clips of the entries, which are a staple of awards shows. The stream should not have been blocked at all, but just as bad was the inability of Ustream to call off their own robot when they were made aware of the problem. The Hugos and their fans are the ones who paid for this incompetence.
TechCrunch has a brief article on it.
rjb
