The popular and influential conservative website Legal Insurrection had its YouTube channel and all content completely erased after the Google company claimed to receive multiple third-party copyright infringement complaints.
Cornell University Law Professor and Legal Insurrection’s founder William Jacobson said the YouTube notification came without warning on Thursday and he wasn’t given a chance to counter the claims. On his site Jacobson wrote:
We have lost hundreds of videos, including a lot of original content on important news subjects. You now will see disabled videos in hundreds of our posts.
I have no idea what the supposedly offending videos are. We are pretty careful when it comes to copyright, so I’m suspecting that someone about whom we posted a video made the claims.
Speaking to Fox News, Jacobson added, “It’s very frustrating, it’s very scary, to have eight years of content removed without a chance to defend yourself.”
But by Friday, it became clearer as to what happened:
I just received notice from YouTube that the copyright claims were filed by the Modern Language Association based on excerpts of audio of pro- and anti-Israel speakers at the MLA Annual Meeting we reported on in this post, Massive DEFEAT for BDS at Modern Language Association.
"Clearly this was a politically motivated move," Jacobson said. "I never received any request or complaint from MLA. These were perfectly legitimate fair use excerpts with great news value. This is an attempt to silence our reporting on a matter of great public importance.”
But Jacobson and his team are ready to “fight this both at the YouTube and legal level:”
It is highly questionable that MLA owns the copyright for oral presentations at the Annual Meeting, and even if it did, the limited excerpts we used from the nearly 2-hour video posted by MLA on YouTube are well-within fair use. What I think is really going on here is that anti-Israel activists at MLA complained to MLA that MLA had posted the audio on YouTube. MLA took down its own 2-hour video and now seeks to silence our reporting.
This isn’t the first conservative channel YouTube has censored. Most recently, dozens (and counting) of Dennis Prager’s popular Prager U videos were banned. YouTube has also previously removed a Christian movie trailer which dared to teach the Biblical view of against homosexuality citing "deceptive content." It makes a practice of removing videos critical of Islam, including MEMRI TV and Palestinian watchdog groups, but often leaves content promoting violence against Jews.
