I didn't want to close out the year doing a copyright rant video but I really
have to document this. There's this video here about a Pioneer cassette deck, and a
few people have noticed that recently it was taken down and no longer available
to be viewed on YouTube due to a copyright claim. And that's a persistent
problem with these audio equipment review videos. You naturally have to play
some music to demonstrate them and you end up with copyright claims on your
videos no matter how short of a clip you use in your video, and I dispute every
single one of them as Fair Use and ultimately I'm successful in many of
those disputes. In this case they rejected my disputes and I followed it
up with an appeal and there were originally two copyright claims on the video. One of
them has since disappeared but this one came back again. What happened is they
rejected my appeal and when that happens normally it says you have seven days to
either cancel your appeal or wait for it to take down your video, after which
point you will get a copyright strike on your account, but you can follow up with
a counter notification, and in that situation the company putting the
copyright claim on your video has to take you to court, or else after 10 to 14
business days their claim on your video will be removed and the copyright strike
will be removed, and the video will be restored. In this case something very
weird happened. You can see it is saying a takedown as scheduled for this video
but saying it's scheduled for December 31st, 1969. Now, if you know anything about
the UNIX operating system, time began in the UNIX operating system on January 1st,
1970 that's the very first day of the clock system that UNIX uses, and many
websites -- apparently including YouTube -- run on UNIX or UNIX-based operating
systems, and there's a bug occurs that if you specify some unknown date like for
example, say, a year of -1 got into the system somehow
it shows up as December 31st, 1969 which, would also happen I believe in 2038
It would wrap back around to 1970 if they don't update it to a 64-bit time system,
but that's a subject for another video. So this is actually not the first time
this happened to my video. This happened last week, and I documented it in this
Reddit thread. You can see five days ago it had the same message saying your video will
be taken down on December 31st 1969 and I did reach out to TeamYouTube on
Twitter and to my surprise they actually did respond to me, and they said they
received similar reports and they'll look into it, and I updated it again... let
me see... that was four days ago, so a day later, I said apparently
it's now 1969 again because that copyright strike did happen on that
video, and the video was taken down, and I immediately filed a counter notification
against it. And another update just a day ago: Without needing to wait for that 10
to 14 day period which I talked about, YouTube sent me an e-mail saying my
counter notification was successful and the video was restored and the strike was
removed from my account -- all of which was true, but what also reappeared
was this takedown scheduled for December 31st 1969, which is actually illegal
according to the DMCA -- the Digital Millennium Copyright Act -- if your counter
notification is successful and the copyright claimant does not sue you, the
copyright claim is supposed to be permanently removed from the video and
it's supposed to never be able to come back. Well, in this case it did, and this
is what's really annoying me, and it may end up getting me a second copyright
strike for the same copyright claim on the video, which is not supposed to
happen. I reached out to YouTube in every way possible to me, first on
Twitter and they replied "we've checked your account and no longer see any
active strikes". Well, that's true -- it's not an active strike because it hasn't
happened yet! But I'm saying they're threatening it's
going to take down my video and give me another strike for the same video
whenever it decides that it's December 31st 1969 again. And they tell me to get
back to them if the issue persists after 48 hours. Well, we'll see, I guess
tomorrow, January 1st, if it's 1969 again. I also e-mailed YouTube Partner Support
through that address there because the way they tell you to do it through the
web site going to the Get Support menu and then clicking on Get Creator Support
no longer works. That option is no longer available, so it appears that YouTube
does not officially offer e-mail support to YouTube Partners, and I've talked
about this with another YouTube Partner who said his ability to do that has also
been removed, but I did luckily save the e-mail address they use which is
yt-partner-support@google.com and they wrote back to me, and they said, we
don't deal with copyright issues in this Partner support team. You have to e-mail
copyright@youtube.com, which I did as well, but in my past experience with
sending emails to that copyright@youtube.com address they either never
respond at all or they take weeks to respond -- sometimes up to a month -- and
obviously I'm getting tired of waiting weeks and months to get this copyright
claim removed from the video, so I'm really starting to get rather frustrated
and I even threatened that if this copyright claim keeps coming back, even
though my counter notification was supposed to have permanently removed it,
I'm considering this to be harassment and I'll have a lawyer file a cease and
desist letter against the claimant, which I believe is Sony Music Entertainment
and Universal Music Group, and also YouTube. So I may end up having to do
that. Normally it costs a couple hundred dollars to get one of those letters
filed, but I'll see what I can do, because it's really starting to get ridiculous.
I mean, you can even see this information that's supposed to be filled
out -- that's another legal requirement of the DMCA: they're supposed to tell you
the e-mail address of who filed the claim on your video and what
they're exactly claiming and this is all blank, so I guess I'll just have to sit
here and wait until midnight and see if December 31st, 1969 happens on January
1st, 2020. With how screwed up YouTube is lately I wouldn't be surprised.
"I think it's time Richard that you complained" ... "About what?" ...
"About these wrong numbers for the
Chinese takeaway" ... "No, I do not have a special offer on spicy prawn balls. This
is not the Chinese takeaway -- and will you please get off my white slimline
telephone with last number redial!"