YouTube has removed the channel for popular conservative blog Legal Insurrection, taking down every video allegedly without prior warning.
YouTube claims that the channel was removed “based on excerpts of audio of pro- and anti-Israel speakers at the MLA Annual Meeting,” which Legal Insurrection covered. However, the site claims that they never received a warning or a copyright strike prior to the channel’s removal. Copyright infringements are usually sanctioned with a single strike, cautioning the channel against any further incidents. YouTube opts to remove a channel after three strikes.
“We have lost hundreds of videos, including a lot of original content on important news subjects. You now will see disabled videos in hundreds of our posts,” claimed Legal Insurrection in a post on their website. “I have no idea what the supposedly offending videos are. We are pretty careful when it comes to copyright, so I’m suspecting that someone about whom we posted a video made the claims.”
“We intend to fight this both at the YouTube and legal level,” they continued. “It is highly questionable that MLA owns the copyright for oral presentations at the Annual Meeting, and even if it did, the limited excerpts we used from the nearly 2-hour video posted by MLA on YouTube are well-within fair use.”
“What I think is really going on here is that anti-Israel activists at MLA complained to MLA that MLA had posted the audio on YouTube,” concluded the blog. “MLA took down its own 2-hour video and now seeks to silence our reporting.”
Attempting to view Legal Insurrection’s channel or videos on YouTube now returns users with a red banner notice declaring, “This channel has been terminated because we received multiple third-party claims of copyright infringement regarding material the user posted,” while every video has been deleted.
In October, Breitbart News reported that YouTube had placed some of conservative channel PragerU’s videos on “restricted mode,” a mode designed to stop children from viewing inappropriate adult content.
Videos covering topics such as whether George Bush lied about the Iraq War, the university “diversity scam,” and whether Sharia Law and freedom can coexist, were all placed on restricted mode– meaning the videos couldn’t be watched at schools, libraries, or on computers with parental blocks.
Charlie Nash is a reporter for Breitbart Tech. You can follow him on Twitter @MrNashington or like his page at Facebook.
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