Techdirt has been around for almost 30 years now, and the one internet law issue that never seems to change is the bullshit use of copyright to take down speech. It’s run through basically our entire history. Back in 2020 we wrote about a copyright dispute involving an author of, well, “wolf-kink erotica” using the DMCA to remove works by a competitor writing books in the same genre. The YouTuber Lindsay Ellis did a (very good) explainer video about it all and then… faced a ridiculous copyright legal threat herself.
About a week or so ago, Ellis published a video on a very different topic: cruise lines. It was something like two and a half hours long. Ellis — who I would say is a skeptic of the entire concept of cruises — decided to go all in, taking a bunch of different cruises in a row to see what all the fuss was about and how the various lines compare. After seeing the video mentioned on Bluesky, I clicked on it and… ended up watching the whole thing (albeit at 2.5x speed). I’m not that interested in cruises, but Ellis is a great sardonic storyteller and the video is really well done, mixing details about the individual cruise lines and how they treat their workers (mostly not well) and the environment (potentially even worse) with her own experiences on those trips.
But, apparently that video is currently gone from YouTube (she has kept it up on the subscription service Nebula)… because of copyright, as Ellis explained in a YouTube short.
Yeah. In the middle of a two-plus hour video about cruise lines, there’s a clip — just a few seconds long — of a friend who joined Ellis on one of the trips singing karaoke. And that caused the entire video to come down while the “dispute” was adjudicated.
And, as Ellis notes, YouTube by default sides with the copyright holder, because the nature of copyright law is that it very, very, very strongly encourages intermediaries to side with the copyright claimant, even if that claim is obvious bullshit and clearly fair use (as is the case here). YouTube’s ContentID system is basically built with that in mind. Even as YouTube spent years fighting back against copyright maximalism and winning the massive DMCA case Viacom filed against it, in the end, to keep the big copyright holders happy, ContentID is really designed to strongly favor copyright claimants, even when their claims are bullshit.
The culprit in this case? Apparently our old friends at Warner/Chappell, which, let’s just say, have a history of this sort of absolute bullshit. Warner/Chappell is a music publisher, and publishers tend to be even more copyright maximalist than the labels themselves. It’s likely that Warner/Chappell holds the copyright on the underlying composition that is playing in the background, and which can barely be heard for the few seconds while Ellis’ friend is singing karaoke. That’s clearly fair use and similar to the dancing baby case from over a decade ago, where some music playing incidentally in the background shouldn’t lead to a video being taken down (the difference here being that it looks like this is a ContentID claim, rather than a full DMCA takedown which would require Warner/Chappell to take fair use into consideration).
On Bluesky, Ellis points out that this wasn’t an automated takedown. Her lawyers asked people at Warner/Chappell to pull the claim and they refused, claiming (incredibly) that because the song “was not the topic of the video” they wouldn’t pull the claim.
That is… not how any of this is supposed to work.
Ellis also notes that she uploaded the video weeks before publishing it (as YouTube encourages creators to do) precisely so ContentID could flag any potential issues — and nothing came up until the video passed a million views. Then suddenly Warner/Chappell put in a claim, as Ellis says, just “to be an asshole.”
This sort of nonsense happens all the time, but it’s pretty incredible that we’re now nearly three decades into the DMCA itself and we’re still dealing with this kind of blatant abuse of copyright, which is mostly just a shakedown from companies like Warner/Chappell which will then run to Congress and claim they need more copyright expansion to protect them from “piracy.”
Maybe what we actually need are laws that protect the people doing the creative work from parasites like Warner/Chappell.