Yep, that happened. During the chaos of Tommy Sotomayor DMCA takedown chaos on the Drunken Peasants youtube channel, we have Complex, an entertainment and news publication with a somewhat urban slant, filing a copyright claim resulting in the blocking of Drunken Peasants episode 309 worldwide.
https://twitter.com/DrunkenPeasants/status/809472968938045440
I was only able to watch half the episode – a bit last night, and then I planned on watching the rest when I woke up today, as is normal for me and watching Drunken Peasants on work days. Well, so much for that today – I woke up and checked twitter to see this pop up right in my feed first thing. So much for finishing up that episode, right?
I don’t know which particular segment did them in – I haven’t read that deep into the tweets – but that doesn’t matter. I do suspect what section it was, but again, it doesn’t matter what or where it is in the video. This is yet another example of a company simply not understanding the concept of fair use for criticism and critique.
YouTube, get your shit in gear. You’re so scared of a company suing you for content hosted on your services, not realizing you are the big thing here, with the monster that is Google behind you, for better or worse. You are the elephant and the companies hosting things on your servers, and abusing your services, they are the mice. Stop letting them control the YouTube landscape.
Oh wait, I forgot, you’re in financially with them, so it’s best to let companies do what they want to, right? Even if that includes violating the law to censor people, regardless of what they do or don’t have to say.
I don’t have much more to say. This is just stupid, and mad props to Ben for calling Complex out on this the moment he found out.