Collateral Damage: Viacom's YouTube Takedowns Include Personal Home Videos (original) (raw)

from the whoops dept

We’ve covered Viacom’s demand that YouTube takedown approximately 100,000 clips based on copyright violations, but how did they come up with those 100,000 videos. Not too carefully, it appears. Reports are starting to show up of people with perfectly legitimate videos getting caught in the crossfire. One person found that his 30 second home video of some friends at dinner was yanked offline at Viacom’s request. Not even the name of the video would confuse people into associating it with a Viacom property — but, thanks to the DMCA, YouTube immediately took the video down. While the guy can now reply and show that the takedown was a mistake, but it still seems a bit unfair that Viacom can just yank anyone’s video offline that quickly.