Youtube copyright bots finally tick off someone who understands copyright law

Harvard law professor and Creative Commons co-founder Lawrence Lessig knows a thing or two about copyright law. So when a record company demanded that he remove a video from YouTube that featured one of their artists’ songs, he not only fought back to keep the clip online, but has now sued that record company in the hopes of getting it, and others, to stop using auto-scanning technology to take advantage of consumers who may not know their rights.

This all began back in 2010, when Lessig gave a keynote address at a Creative Commons conference in South Korea. During the 49-minute lecture (which you can watch above), he showed how people from around the world had made their own versions of a music videos for “Lisztomania,” a song by French musicians Phoenix.

Given that Section 107 of the Copyright Act permits “fair use” of copyrighted materials “for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research,” Lessig shouldn’t have been concerned that the video of his lecture contained copyrighted material, as it was all being shown in the spirit of the fair use doctrine.

“If I’m using it for purposes of critique, then I can use if even if I don’t have permission of the original copyright owner,” he explains to NPR.
Things went fine until June 2013. Within a short period of time, YouTube received takedown notices related to this lecture video from both Viacom and Liberation Music, the Australian record company that holds the copyright to the Phoenix song.