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takyon [soylentnews.org] writes:

The latest episode of Family Guy featured footage from the NES game Double Dribble, showing a glitch that allows a player to easily make three-point shots. The video was apparently copied directly from YouTube. TorrentFreak reports [torrentfreak.com] that the over seven-year-old original video has either been blocked by Fox using the DMCA or automatically blocked by the ContentID system:

Interestingly the clip that was uploaded by sw1tched was the exact same clip that appeared in the Family Guy episode on Sunday. So, unless Fox managed to duplicate the gameplay precisely, Fox must've taken the clip from YouTube. Whether Fox can do that and legally show the clip in an episode is a matter for the experts to argue but what followed next was patently absurd. Shortly after the Family Guy episode aired, Fox filed a complaint with YouTube and took down the Double Dribble video game clip on copyright grounds [youtube.com]. (mirror Daily Motion [dailymotion.com])

Faced with yet another example of a blatantly wrongful takedown, TorrentFreak spoke with Fight for the Future [fightforthefuture.org] CTO Jeff Lyon. Coincidentally he'd just watched the episode in question. "It's most likely that this is just another example of YouTube's Content ID system automatically taking down a video without regard to actual copyright ownership and fair use. As soon as FOX broadcast that Family Guy episode, their robots started taking down any footage that appeared to be reposted from the show — and in this case they took down the footage they stole from an independent creator," Lyon says.

YouTube's troubles with overzealously removing fair use content are well documented [eff.org]. It seems now that even original content isn't safe once the media industry gets a hold of it.

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