My YouTube account has been suspended, perhaps terminated, cancelled, kaput. They have a ‘three strikes and you’re out’ system of dealing with copyright infringement. I had two strikes, one for uploading the opening credits to Mon Oncle, the other for a clip from the film Religulous. Suddenly today my gmail account was suspended and this evening I found out it was because Google/YouTube have suspended the YouTube account. The reason being I now have a third strike, not because of a new upload but a clip from The IT Crowd is under a copyright claim from MPI Media Group. As far as I can tell, this is a company publishing DVDs of TV shows.
OK, fair enough I guess, none of these are mine to upload, but I think they could be fairer in the amount of notice given. In each case if they’d given me a day to remove each violating video I would happily have done so. Also because it isn’t a new upload, you can get three strikes so easily on content you’ve had uploaded for years. The IT Crowd clip had been online for two years. Imagine if someone has three MPI Media copyrighted files uploaded – instantly their account would be cancelled.
YouTube say the only way to get my account reactivated is to win a counter claim for one of the videos, yet the counter-claim page says: ‘If you did not have all of the rights to post the material at issue, you MUST NOT submit a counter-notification’. So, a classic Catch-22. I am also suspended from creating a new account. (This is easy to get around by using another email address). I’d like to have my walking videos back online. The TV stuff I don’t really care about. This suspension happened as my channel reached over 1,000,000 views. I think I’ll probably head over to Vimeo instead but I need to test the WordPress embedding. So a lot of my blog now links to nothing…
…
The new MacBook Pro line was released today. The 15″ and 17″ are now on quad core Sandy Bridge Intel i7 and the 13″ has an almighty leap from Core2Duo to i5 or i7 Sandy Bridge. I was thinking of moving from the 15″ MBP to the 13″ but there is no discreet graphics card in that model, so it’s not great for video work. The new models have Thunderbolt which is 20x faster than USB 2.0
…
Feeling much better again. So very glad to sit in the sunshine at lunchtime, absorbing light, heat, relaxing. It’s been quite a sunless winter in Hampshire.
Steps stepped 4579 plus a few later this eve.
Falling Awake 
I found you with a google search. It seems that the MPI Media Group went on a recent IT crowd banning spree. My account got banned not even based on a clip of the shop. I had a single picture of Moss as my video background and I played my own music over the top of it. Completely frivolous and I have filed a counter notfication.
YouTube need to look to see if there is an existing agreement in place e.g. with Channel 4 and then write telling of the new claim. This instant strike system especially with old videos is going to lead to them being overwhelmed with counter notifications. Good luck with it all. Maybe you could let me know if you have success. It sounds like you have a very good case if it’s just an image. Hey, I’d like to see your video :)
Hi Gavin
I wrote to MPI who agreed to restore the video pretty quickly. See my post.
I just used their webform on the MPI Media Group site and explained the situation.
Good Luck!
I wish I’d read this sooner, as I have two IT Crowd videos in my YouTube account and only realised the effect it has on my account today when I tried to upload an unlisted video.
What annoyed me the most was that way back in 2008 I got an email from YouTube saying Fremantle International (the people that actually had something to do with the show) submitted a copyright claim, but said the content could remain on YouTube!
I wonder if they’d entertain my request, even though it is 6 months after it was originally taken off by them!
Yes I think they would even 6 months later. I explained that I would then take it down immediately, so it wasn’t a way to keep the video online but at least it saved my account.
I too had been informed that it was OK to keep the clip hosted on YouTube – very annoying when out of the blue another company gets involved like this.