Starting the fire: YouTube audio takedowns
Oh, dear. Check out the notice on this Billy Joel fanvid:
merrickart (1 month ago)
Best video of this song I’ve seen! Even better than Billy Joel’s himself.
Perhaps even more troubling is that the poster wasn’t notified of the takedown:
PlaidFox (16 hours ago)
[…]
To YouTube:
I do not appreciate the way I found out that my audio has been muted by you. I found out because someone had posted it on my video, instead of through a formal e-mail through you. This is very unprofessional and is not appreciated.
It’s possible that the user’s email address is registered incorrectly but I wonder if this is evidence of a software-managed takedown? I can imagine a fingerprinting script muting the audio track before the Copyright Office has time to issue a notice.
Worse still, it appears that the audio from this version of We Didn’t Start The Fire was removed but there isn’t a notice on the video’s page.
Vids by Zbar16, deltasix, SkateTroe, and TheCanadaWiseElder have also been silenced but not all instances of “We Didn’t Start The Fire” have been removed. For example, student videos from phantomgirl2006 and jackinthebox1313 have audio and Username:billyjoel continues to not start the fire.
Several of the videos that parody the lyrics in some fashion are still up. For example, We Didn’t Start The Star Wars, an 80s Boston Sports version or this update:
Has anyone else seen this phenomenon? It has only appeared quite recently.
Tags
audio, dmca, freeculture, notice, takedown, todomundo, video, youtube
January 20th, 2008 at 05:26:20 (PST -04:00)
This has happened to me only I did not get a notice!!!!!! I just got silenced!
February 29th, 2008 at 03:09:35 (PST -04:00)
[…] can waffle over whether YouTube’s newly unleashed audio takedown worm will make this activity move elsewhere, but it’ll keep on moving, no doubt. (& I’m […]