Darkoshi

Terrorists used false DMCA claims to get personal data of anti-islamist YouTuber

First, I'll mention a few items from the original German article that I didn't see mentioned in the other English posts I read.

The automated emails sent by YouTube to the channel owners clearly stated that 1) the channel owner had to provide their personal data in order to counter the copyright infringement claim, and 2) that this personal data would be shared with the person who submitted the claim.

YouTube alternately allows you to provide the contact information of an authorized representative (such as a lawyer) rather than your own, but the channel owners didn't discover that until afterwards.

Neither of the 2 main presenters of the channel were willing to share their contact information. Sabatina James (not her real name) was already in a victim's protection program, and in the habit of moving every few years for her own protection. In the past, she received death threats from her own family after fleeing an arranged marriage in Pakistan.

They suspected that the person making the false claim was an Islamist, and they repeatedly tried to tell YouTube this. But they were ignored.

After YouTube received 3 copyright infringement claims and no counter claim, the channel was shut down. After the channel was shut down, one of the channel's collaborators offered to provide his contact information in order to get the channel reinstated. It was this person's personal data that was provided to the false claimant and subsequently made public.

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According to Google's help pages, one can submit a copyright infringement complaint by web-form or email. The web-form requires you to enter your full legal name, address and phone number. But curiously, the email option only says that it requires your contact information "such as an email address, physical address or telephone number".

Whereas, when submitting a counter-notification by email, you are required to include a full legal name, email address, physical address, and phone number.

So it sounds like someone can file a claim by providing only an email address, whereas to fight a claim, one has to disclose much more.

Two of my older YouTube videos have been found to contain 3rd party copyright audio material. On one of the videos, YouTube has muted the audio. I'm not bothered by that; I was dancing to a CD, and the video ended up with most of 2 or 3 Howard Jones songs in it. It's reasonable the copyright holder might not want to allow that. It's a pity though; without the music, the emotion of the dance is lost. I hope they don't identify the music in any of my other videos.

On the other video, which contains Nirvana's Lake of Fire song, YouTube didn't mute it, but added an ad linking to Amazon where you can buy the MP3 of the song. Now that is neat and useful. I've sometimes watched a video with music in it, and wondered what the music was, and if there was a link right there where I could buy the song from, I might do that on occasion. That leaves me feeling good instead of slightly guilty and/or pitying the situation.

I wonder if some copyright owners choose to just have all their music muted, and some choose to instead have ads shown, or if other criteria is also used in the decisions, such as how much of the music is included, the quality of the audio, and/or how popular the video is.