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So I was checking on my YouTube account and noticed that a couple of videos were taking a major nosedive in views all of a sudden. What the hell? A quick click on each video showed the cause of the problem in that cheery pink band that means bad news on YouTube:
This video is no longer available due to a copyright claim by WMG.
Noooooooo. Why WMG, why do you hate me? I wasn’t trying to rip you off, they were harmless videos: one was of a friend’s wedding and the other was of a local Relay For Life event. I promise that no WMG profits were harmed in the making of those videos lol.
Seriously tho, apparently I’m not the only person who’s had their videos put into ‘no longer available’ limbo (not deleted but not viewable). A Google search for This video is no longer available due to a copyright claim by WMG comes up with all sorts of unhappy people posting about how their videos or the videos they were trying to watch have been taken down suddenly. Even a music video posted on a WMG-owned band’s official website was disabled. WTF?
All of this has come out of a recent breakdown in contract negotiations between WMG and YouTube. WMG wants more money and they haven’t gotten it so they started disabling videos left and right. Who knows if it will all work out in the end but it seems like all parties involved are losing right now. Especially WMG since it can’t be great PR for them to constantly have so many people looking forward to watching videos only to get a takedown message with the WMG name in it instead.
Aye, it’s a crying shame!
Hopefully we can put vids back at some point… though it means an awful lot of uploading and typing the correct info for each video. I now keep copies of all text on any video removed.. saves time later!
Just don’t give up!
Langsense
Hi Langsense,
Yeah hopefully some of these big companies will see the light before it’s too late. Forcing videos offline only takes their product out of the conversation. It seems like this will hurt profits in the long run but hey what do I know. Maybe some of the decision makers are just clinging to a world that stopped existing a few years ago lol.
Hopefully the vids get restored but in the meantime I think I’ll take your advice and start saving the info on everything. Thanks for the comment :)
Why not use an alternative like http://www.dailymotion.com?
Hi,
Yeah, I’ve been thinking about hosting some of the videos that are blocked on YouTube elsewhere. Though it would be really nice to keep everything centrally located.
In the long run I’m just going to be more careful about what music I include in videos. No more free advertising for WMG since they want to be dropped from the conversation anyway.
I do hope those videos will be restored.Thanks for posting this.Now I learn from your experience.
Hi Amy,
Thanks, yes the videos were restored after quite a while though now they have restrictions (like people in some countries can’t watch them) and ads on them. Better than nothing but it’s still crappy lol, all the more reason to listen to music from indie artists though :).
I even had this problem with some completely royalty free music! Somehow whatever algorithm they use was detecting something similar, and they put in the ban.
I just went ahead and changed the music and did the re-upload thing, but what a hassle.
As for the one commenter asking about the use of dailymotion – nothing compares with YouTube! This may or may not be a good thing though.
Hi Susan,
Yeah it really sucks that the algorithms can be off and then it’s a huge hassle or impossible to get un-banned. Plus enough mistakes by the algorithm and your whole account could be wiped out.
There are alternatives out there but YouTube definitely has the largest community by far of all the video sites and so naturally it’s the place most people want to put their videos. Some people prefer to have a small quiet community but most want to have as many people as possible see and have conversations about their videos.
Anyway, good luck with your videos and I hope you don’t have any more problems with rogue algorithms.
Wow…randomly blocking people’s personal videos? It seems the WMG has gone totally out of control. I like anonymous’ idea of saving a copy of the upload info for each video, since you never really know if you will have to reload it on YouTube. When are they going to learn to quit fighting this battle and just let information be free?
Hi Kendra,
Yep it’s always a good idea to make backups of things like that…it only takes a second to copy and paste into a note file but it could take forever to re-write those same descriptions if you have a lot of videos that get deleted. And that’s just assuming you’ll remember the basics of what you wrote in the first place lol.