Okay, let’s see now. I get a movie to review on the site the other day and post two videos also sent by the PR folks who sent the screener on my YouTube channel. Today, I see that one of those videos for whatever reason has been taken down thanks to the request of some other company I have no clue about and according to the new and f—ked up YouTube rules:
You received a copyright strike
You now have 1 copyright strike. Getting multiple copyright strikes can lead to the termination of your account and the removal of all your videos. To avoid that from happening, please don’t upload videos that contain copyrighted content that you aren’t allowed to use.
Oh, DROP DEAD, please. I’m not running that clip to violate a copyright, I’m RUNNING IT AS PART OF MY GODDAMN REVIEW. Period. What the hell is up with all this nonsense that keeps people from producing content (and UNPAID content at that when it comes to my channel) and stupid threats that just make honest guys like me want to go out and drop a planet on some jerks with quick trigger fingers. Your stupid mandatory “Copyright School” video I’m forced to watch and be quizzed on is insulting and I can’t watch it anyway on my slow-ass connection here, which means I can’t respond to the fools who had that clip removed (yet).
If anything’s going to get me to drop off the damn internet and go be a cranky hermit in the woods, it’s shit like this. How about having idiots who have issues with content contact the ALLEGED offenders directly and see what’s what BEFORE this jackass judo you do on the accounts of innocent people? This chop first, ask questions maybe later thing isn’t going to cut it with me. Whatever. Thanks for ruining my Sunday night, clowns.
"DESTROY ALL FANBOYS!" 
I’m not sure if you’ve seen my podcasts that I’ve done along these lines, but I definitely feel your pain. If you look up my videos on a really nifty fan-game called “Super Mario Country,” you’ll notice that I took a big hit from Twitch on one of the videos when it flagged nearly half the video as containing copyrighted music. The reality was that this was Nintendo’s own music being played IN THE GAME, and yet Twitch was giving me a message saying that you could “buy the Super Mario Land 2 OST” for whatever it cost at the time on iTunes.
On YouTube itself, a few things have flagged. This recent Sonic the Hedgehog fan game I streamed flagged too. In these cases, it only affects monetization (which I currently don’t worry about), but it is a representation of a greater issue with over-worry about copyright stuff.
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It’s a REALLY lazy manner of dealing with a “problem” for sure. It makes more sense for someone who wants to pull any video to simply contact the person first, tell them they’re in violation (while explaining what was violated) and ask that the video be removed. If the person refuses and can’t make a clear reason why it needs to stay uop, then have it yanked and a violation issued.
Sure, it places the bulk of the work on the people who file claims, but I’d bet most of the folks who file these claims have the money to pay staffers to poke around and look for actual violations and not harass people who don’t intentionally commit them. I don’t think that clip violated anything, but I’m wondering if the folks who filed it represent one of the actors in the clip and may not have known I was sent a few clips by a PR firm handling the film to be used in promoting it? If so, that ticks me off even more because that’s just a lack of communication I have nothing at all to do with.
Oh well, I sent out an email to see what’s what and will hopefully have a response at some point later today.
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Exactly. Technically, someone from a competing studio or representing one in a sneaky manner or another could have basically advocated to get the video pulled too. It’s very hard to say.
The Twitch stuff really bothers me though, because any stream that they detect copyrighted video or audio in, they just mute the whole thing. This sucks when people play stuff like GTA5, then play the radio in game, and then get the entire video muted. The Mario thing sucked too because it was actual music from the actual game =P I eventually got over it, but I think this is all incredibly lazy, especially if we aren’t talking about making money really off the stuff in the first place, so it just is a factor of losing personal time and effort to produce content…
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Interestingly enough, some detective work reveals the company that yanked the video has been doing this with a bunch of other videos on YouTube, specifically for some bands and a few other films. There’s more, but I need to get the info I found to some more people so I can find out what’s going on. It seems that someone didn’t communicate somewhere along the line and I got a strike I certainly didn’t need. The stupid thing is YouTube allows you to file a counter-claim, but the person who filed the first claim can actually sue me as a response (!), which is STUPID. I’m not paying a lawyer just to find out I’m in the right. This whole idea of changing things up to penalize everyone at the cost of a few bad apples is one of the dumbest things I’ve ever experienced…
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Yeah, that just sounds terrible. I enjoy services like Twitch and YouTube, but stuff like this can really sour the experience for me. It sucks because it’d be one thing if we were talking about a video you made $1M in ad-revenue from, because at least I might understand a legal concern IF there was a valid complaint. But here, it’s just pointless and shows stupidity on a few people’s parts.
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Well, I’m hoping my own example of getting unfairly targeted starts something good off in terms of how these things are handled. It’s just odd to penalize in a carpet-bombing manner. I understand the same company has been going after fans of some music acts down to having videos yanked and accounts sunk of people who had videos up for months or years even if those people added every conceivable copyright and even had links of where viewers could legally buy those songs from.
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