This YouTube Debacle is Bananas
If you’ve been up on your tech news this past week, you may be familiar already with the sudden wave of copyright flagging that has been happening with the new and “improved” content ID matching system on YouTube. If not, here’s a pretty good summary of what’s happening.
That’s not the whole problem though. While this egregious blitzkrieg on game reviewers is bad and completely ignores fair use laws in the United States, there’s also some crazier stuff that’s going on.Things like Indie devloper Terry Cavanagh getting copyright claims against his own work.
Uh, I’m sorry, WHAT? Apparently my own video trailer of VVVVVV has a copyright claim against it? pic.twitter.com/sQfGyBBpxg
— Terry (@terrycavanagh) December 17, 2013
Even months ago before this big change, YouTube sent me a violation notice saying my footage of The Witness was owned by Sony. Uhh, no…
— Jonathan Blow (@Jonathan_Blow) December 13, 2013
Anyways, Google’s sent out a letter to users stating that everything is awesome, and some companies such as Capcom have reached out to try and fix the problem…
YouTubers: Pls let us know if you've had videos flagged today. These may be illegitimate flags not instigated by us. We are investigating.
— Capcom-Unity (@Capcom_Unity) December 10, 2013
… but there still remains an issue with this automated system allowing for too many false positives and too much abuse. Here’s another good read. Odd that we’re all so reliant on Google, innit?