YouTube Blindly Follows Viacom’s Demands, Deletes Legitimate Videos

Over the last week, Viacom, reportedly after negotiations went nowhere, demanded YouTube remove 100,000 videos. Now, people are complaining that legitimate videos got swept up in the Great Purge, including this guy who had a video of him and some buddies discussing RSS and OPML, deleted because it occured in a restaurant that shares a name with a CBS personality.
What’s always been ridiculous with YouTube’s copyright enforcement is that the few times it even tries to enforce it, it usually deleted tons of legitimate content, with this incident being the worst. It appears that CBS entered the names of its shows into the search engine, and everything that came up, they demanded it be removed. Jason is trying to build a list of videos that were deleted (it’s obviously in very early stages) and considering a feature for VidMirror that would detect when a video is deleted […]

Original post by Nathan Weinberg