The law that keeps on giving

I made a post a while ago about my first (and hopefully only) direct run-in with the consequences of the Digital Millenium Copyright Act. (see The DMCA rears its head)

Well, there has been a new and annoying development for this situation. I uploaded a video to my account which was really only intended for family. In my experience YouTube typically gives you the option of “public” or “private” so you can control who can see said video; this time I noticed there was a third option called “Unlisted”, which was grayed out for some reason. After some investigation it turns out that a user is not allowed to use this option if they have any “copyright strikes” on their account. Sure enough, the copyright claim leveled against me by the folks representing Van Morrison now evidently affects which YouTube features I am allowed to use.

“No problem,” I thought. “I’ll just see how I go about removing this strike from my account and be on my way.” Come to find out, the strike is permanent. So there you go, upload a video of some street performers, have your account and all of its uploaded content, not to mention a long history of favorites and subscriptions permanently tainted by the circus that is copyright law.