DMCA Horror Stories
Sony takedown over Martin Luther King speech
We (Fight for the Future) published a political commentary about Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, which included footage from the actual speech. The MLK speech was historic, and a lot of other transformative works include audio from it. One of those works is apparently a song copyrighted by Sony, who uses an automated system to scan YouTube for their copyrighted material. Because our video and their song had some audio in common (the MLK speech), they flagged our video and issued a Content ID strike.
The Content ID system and other automated copyright scanning methods are prone to false positives, and unfortunately these false positives err on the side of punishing smaller creators who aren’t able to fight big companies like Sony.
