If you missed last night’s NASA landing and tried to check it out this morning, you may have had some trouble. NASA posted a 13 minute excerpt of the Curiosity Mars rover’s landing on their official YouTube channel. Within a matter of minutes, the video was taken down with a message explaining the video contained copyrighted material claimed by Scripps Local News. NASA’s video should not have been removed, since, not only did they create it, but it’s also public domain content.
The Digital Millennium Copyright Act allows YouTube to escape liability if they remove content when someone claims to hold a copyright to it. The DMCA then allows users to submit a counter claim if they believe their content does not infringe on an existing copyright and was wrongfully removed.
It’s unclear exactly how or why Scripps filed the complaint, or whether YouTube took it down automatically because their system believed it copied an existing video. Scripps Local News released an apology for the problem through a spokesperson for their parent company, E.W. Scripps Company. This is not the first NASA video that has been taken down on a claim by Scripps. Bob Jacobs, NASA’s Deputy Associate Administrator for Communications said that DMCA complaints routinely disrupt NASA’s online presence. The repeated invalid takedowns are probably a result of YouTube’s automated copyright system that can block wrongfully claimed material.
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