The Last of Us is a survival horror game due to come out soon, but that doesn’t really matter. What does matter is that the trailer for the game debuted at the Spike Video Game Awards, and that program was broadcast by Viacom. Accordingly, Viacom has filed copyright claims on all trailers of the game that popped up on YouTube… Including the developer’s official channel. That’s right, Viacom took down the developer’s trailer, on a game the devs own, because a video of the trailer was broadcast on one of Viacom’s shows. The “misunderstanding” has since been sorted out.
However, there is a bill being considered by Congress called the Stop Online Piracy Act, or SOPA. If this had happened under SOPA, not only would Naughty Dog, the developers of The Last of Us have no channel and no recourse to protest, but the takedown would have hit their distributors, advertisers, and payment processing companies as well. In other words, it probably would have put Naughty Dog out of business.
If this was your website, or your video, or your online business, what could you do?
When the trailer did come back up, it mentioned the Video Game Awards in its title. There’s a reason we call big media companies the copyright cartel.
The DMCA is broken.
It’s good that these large companies can quickly resolve these sorts of stupid behaviors by negotiation; but a little guy who makes a video and gets it falsely taken down through this sort of irresponsible behavior has little recourse to calling the perpetrator out for what is basically perjury.
Claiming copyright over something you have no copyright over and then having it removed marks an essential damage to both reputation and essentially loss of money in some cases. If sites like YouTube must knock speech offline at the lightest hint, then the time that a speaker loses is on the head of the people who misrepresented themselves.