So the other week I received a notice from YouTube that two of my videos were taken down due to a copyright violation. I could chose to go with it, or fight it – and if I lost I could end of up court. The offending videos were two less-than-30-second snippets of songs from a Garth Brooks concert I went to here in Houston all the way back in 2015 (almost 3 years ago).
Here’s the email:
It’s a forgone conclusion that people take videos at concerts to relive the fun and of course to share with friends and family on various social media. It’s going to happen. It’s 2018 and we all have pocket sized video cameras, and we live in a technological world where data is shared in large quantities. This includes clips of songs from concerts.
So, Pearl Records Inc. – get your head out of your ass and get it into 2018.
But that’s not really my whole tirade. To be honest I didn’t really care. I ignored the email. The vids were gone, they were 2 years old and I’d probably never need or watch them again anyway. A few weeks had passed until today, and I found myself needing to go into my YouTube account settings – something I rarely do.
I was greeted by this:
Which in itself isn’t bad on the surface – except for the part where you can’t do anything unless you “go to Copyright school,” watch a video, and pass a 5 question quiz. There’s no way around it.
What.
The.
Fuck.
So now it’s time to circle back around to the title of this entry. Is this truly a worthwhile copyright violation or is it just petty bullshit? I vote for petty bullshit. And on top of it, being forced to do YouTube’s asinine quiz before I could get to my account settings was infuriating.
At the end of the day, it’s not a big deal. Just something worthy of a good ol’ fashioned
yankee.velo.foxtrot 