DMCA
The DMCA, or Digital Millennium Copyright Act, is a legal tool which gives copyright holders the ability to have infringing content (that they legally own the copyright to) quickly taken down from media websites. Due to legal pressure from the intellectual property lobby, YouTube's policy regarding the DMCA is to "take down first and ask questions later" whenever a claim is filed against a video. (This is in contrast to flagging a video for YT Community Guidelines violations, which usually requires a number of reports and manual review before a video will be taken down or age-restricted.) Unfortunately, this has resulted in the DMCA feature on YouTube being widely abused by various people to censor opinions they don't like, and take down videos that are criticizing their own content. Filing a copyright claim against a video can also get a channel unfairly taken down, since channels that have several DMCAs filed against them in quick succession (or receive even one copyright flag when they're already in poor standing) can automatically be disabled by YouTube's algorithms. Filing multiple DMCA's or even a single DMCA fraudulently can lead to serious legal consequences as well as banning of the DMCA abuser.
Serial DMCA Abusers
- Brett Keane
- Happy Cabbie
- Raoul "AtheismDefended" DeMarest
- TrueEmpiricism
- NephilimFree
- VenomFangX
- James Paul VonHelton
Members of the GDC who have had Malicious DMCA's Filed Against Them
- Steve McRae (By TrueEmpiricism- Fought back and video was reinstated)
- Reds Rhetoric (by TrueEmpiricism- On two occasions...videos were reinstated)
- HogTieChamp (By various... all videos reinstated)
