Another Thanksgiving-related post, and my first ever take down notice! Last Thursday, since it was turkey-day, and since we talk about robots in class, and since Carl Brutananadilewski was our mascot for the chapter on e-commerce, I thought I would post the Aqua Teen Hunger Force episode titled ‘The Dressing.’

This episode revolves around a robot turkey who comes from the future to take Carl, who it turns out is a hyper-evolved chicken from the future, back to save the robot turkeys from annihilation by their chicken overlords. Or something like that. Honestly, it’s a little hard to follow

In order to make it easy to embed in a post, I uploaded it to YouTube who instantly informed me that even though I had set the video to ‘Unlisted,’ it contained copyrighted material and may be in violation of copyrights.Well, today I got this:

Busted

I noticed that it states I can contact the party that requested the removal and ask them to retract their notice, and I’ve though about it. I wonder if I told them the video was Unlisted, that it was relevant in many ways to topics we discuss in class, and it was Thanksgiving. they’d reconsider.

My guess is no.

[UPDATE]: When I logged into YouTube at 1:56pm, this is the screen that greeted me:

Busted again

Once I acknowledged the notice, I was then automatically redirected to a page called “Copyright School,” where I had to watch a video and answer questions about copyright. That’s right, Google made me take a quiz about a topic I teach in this very class. They don’t know me, however, so no harm done. I certainly learned something, but it wasn’t about copyright, it was about Google.

Busted again

You can’t blame them, copyright infringement is an enormous issue, and I’ll even go so far as to say one of the biggest facing the industry and Internet today. Again, they don’t know me or my intentions, and I suspect everyone who gets one of these notices has to go through the same thing.

(By the way, I didn’t watch the video, but I answered all the questions correctly. Go me!)

Because of this, I have lost access to some features such as unlisted videos and videos longer than 15 minutes. I will try to appeal those features, although I have another account I can use if worse comes to worse. We’ll see. I did have to go through this screen for the appeal. If the Men in Black come to take me away, you’ll know why.

In a way I’m proud of this, my first takedown notice. I don’t plan on making it a habit, of course, and the video really was intended as an educational tool to serve as another discussion point of robotics, AI, and ethics; it’s the reason I didn’t think twice about using the actual name of the show and the episode in the title, which I suspect is what alerted them in the first place. I appealed, hopefully they will remove the strike and not sue so I can use the account for future class-relevant videos. And copyright does need to be protected. Moral of the story: DON’T UPLOAD AQUA TEEN HUNGER FORCE EPISODES TO YOUTUBE!