Thanks To Automated Copyright Claims And A Troll, Infamous CounterStrike Clip Gets A DMCA Takedown (original) (raw)

from the hodor-hodor dept

At this point, every reader here should be aware that YouTube has a copyright/DMCA problem it has yet to solve. Going through the myriad of posts we’ve done about DMCA and ContentID takedowns on YouTube, the theme is abundantly clear: YouTube’s automated systems are wide open for mistakes, fraud, and abuse. If you don’t think that’s the case, you aren’t paying attention. This is especially illuminated when either very obviously non-infringing clips get taken down via DMCA notice, or when super famous clips that have been around forever are suddenly hit with a DMCA notice and get taken down.

Take the following video clip of a CounterStrike game, for instance. This clip has floated around the internet for nearly 15 years, featuring a guy doing a Snoop Dogg impression and then getting stuck in a door and ultimately killed in-game, to the delight of the person who captured the video.

Well, after existing peacefully for those fifteen years, the clip was suddenly the subject of a DMCA takedown, as explained by PC Gamer.

After nearly 24 million views, however, the video has been hijacked by someone who’s claiming the audio copyright on it. Bob Tik, apparently, says that the game audio of Door Stuck is their own original music.

Politely, in his statement(opens in new tab) KinetiK001 says that the claimant is a copyright troll. For my opinion, at least, this is in fact just someone engaging in widespread copyright fraud: Another YouTuber named 3kliksphilip has identified(opens in new tab) that this is a serial offense for that account.

It seems pretty clear that this has nothing to do with the music or lyrics present in the video. Everyone who has looked at this believes this is just a troll causing trouble for whatever twisted reasons they have.

But that’s the entire point. If the copyright enforcement mechanisms for YouTube are so wide open for this kind of fuckery, then that’s a problem. And it’s been a problem. And YouTube hasn’t seemed particularly interested in solving that problem. Instead, the platform has built such a reputation for being terrible on this sort of thing, the end result is the appearance that YouTube is relying on apathy among the public to get away with it.

It’s really nothing new at this point, just another example of how disingenuous people and automated systems have turned YouTube into a horror show of copyright claims and stolen income from monetized videos.

Maybe YouTube is simply so big that it doesn’t care about any of this, but I find that hard to believe. PC Gamer isn’t some minor publication, after all. When it’s gotten bad enough that the gaming industry goes in on this “horror show” this hard, it’s probably time for the folks over at YouTube to start paying attention.

Filed Under: copyright, copyright troll, counterstrike, dmca
Companies: youtube