From time to time you’ll come across videos with the sound removed due to copyright violations, or in some cases the entire video has been removed due to a DMCA request by the publisher, recording label, or movie studio that owns it. It makes sense and we guess it’s fair since they do own the rights to the video.However in what seems like a flaw in the DMCA system would be how Fox recently managed to DMCA a video clip that they do not own. Basically in the most recent episode of Family Guy, it showed several video clips of classic video games from back in the day, such as the 1980s Nintendo classic Double Dribble.
The footage they used was actually uploaded on YouTube by a user calling himself sw1tched back in February 2009, a good 7 years before the Family Guy episode even aired. However due to the bots crawling the internet for violations, it flagged the video as having violated their copyright, even though the video in question used footage that did not belong to Fox in the first place.
According to Fight for the Future’s CTO Jeff Lyon who spoke to TorrentFreak, “The problem with an automated DMCA takedown system is that robots can never know the difference between fair use and copyright infringement. It is not hyperbolic to call this mass censorship. Instead of copyright holders having to prove a video is infringing, their scanning software can take it down automatically, and then it falls on the creator to prove they had a right to post it.”
YouTube had earlier this year promised to reduce the number of inaccurate copyright takedowns, and they recently announced a new system in which in the case of disputes, YouTubers can continue to earn money from ads. For those who did not see the Family Guy episode, you can check out the clip below.