After the Lofi Girl takedown, can YouTube protect users from copyright claim abuse?
18.07.2022 - 14:55
/ thefader.com
Earlier this week, two of YouTube’s most popular and influential radio streams suddenly disappeared. Lofi Girl is the 10 million subscriber-strong YouTube account behind the seminal “lofi beats to study to,” streams which have logged over 668 million views over two years.
It’s a massive presence on YouTube by any measurement, yet on Sunday the channel announced that the streams "lofi hip hop radio - beats to relax/study to" and "beats to sleep/chill to" had been deleted by a single false copyright strike, filed from someone purporting to be a Malaysian record label. Within hours, YouTube apologized and pledged to restore the streams, but not before the issue became a flashpoint in one of YouTube’s most persistent issues.
For many YouTube users, abuse of the platform’s copyright enforcement system is a significant frustration. Any user that gets “three strikes” of either copyright claims or community guidelines claims will have their channel terminated, a policy that has seen trolls extort users by falsely asserting copyright on the material used in their videos.
Getting any sort of abusive claim resolved through YouTube’s complicated appeal system can lead to a dead end: sometimes, you have to be a massively popular account with a vocal following to get any sort of joy. This is what Lofi Girl pointed out in a subsequent statement: most creators with the same problem don’t have their reach.
“It's 2022, and there are countless smaller creators out there,” the channel wrote, “many of which engaged in this discussion, that continue to be hit daily by these false claims on both videos and livestreams.” YouTube has begun acknowledging the problem in recent years even if the abuse is still occurring. In its first Copyright
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