Metal band DragonForce has been fighting with YouTube’s broken copyright system for a week now. Here’s the latest.
The band took to Twitter to protest a random YouTube user claiming ownership of their song, “Valley of the Damned.” On August 17 the band’s official Twitter account wrote, “Hey YouTube Music, this must be the biggest mess up we’ve seen, and we’ve seen a lot! Any random person can now claim they own a band’s music and they should take it down to avoid a strike?” with a screenshot of the strike they received. YouTube quickly responded saying it was “here to help.” Despite the quick acknowledgment of the issue on social media—nothing else happened for nearly a week.
DragonForce tweeted three days later saying it sent legal letters to YouTube concerning the false takedown. “Our song “Valley of the Damned” is about to be taken down today due to a copyright strike that YouTube believe and checked to be valid. You really not gonna do anything about this YouTube, even after all the legal letters? No reasons given!” the band tweeted. YouTube once again responded, directing the band to the official page to file a counter-claim and retain ownership of the song and video.
After a week of pleading with YouTube to do something about the false strike, the platform finally acknowledged it was wrong and canceled the pending takedown of the song.
“Got an update for you!” the official YouTube account tweeted the band. “We’ve confirmed that the takedown request was invalid. As a result, we’ve cancelled the delayed takedown for the vid and your channel won’t receive a strike. Really appreciate you bringing this to our attention & bearing with us while we sorted this out,” the account states.
It’s unfortunate that the YouTube Content ID system can be abused in such a way that official music channels are subjected to false takedown requests. This is unfortunately very common in the world of Twitch and YouTube gaming videos—less so from an official music channel.
