YouTube Kicked Us Offline for Playing a Public Domain Movie

Oh, the Irony!

Casey and I thought it would be fun to live-stream classic movies while commenting on the art and history of said movies. We created Public Domain Theater specifically because movies in the public domain wouldn’t violate YouTube’s copyright policy.

Yet for some reason, while we were streaming His Girl Friday—a movie that’s been in the public domain for over fifty years—YouTube’s copyright bot kicked us off and gave the channel a warning.

I appealed the decision, and we’ll have to wait to see if they remove the warning. Unfortunately, this means the video wasn’t saved. I did save the audio, however, which means I can slap it over the movie and re-upload the whole thing, in defiance of the copyright gnomes.

So look for that this weekend.

Not YouTube’s Fault

To be clear, I don’t blame YouTube. More than 720,000 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every day, so there’s no way they a human being can possibly watch it all. They have to deploy bots, which are by their nature kinda stupid.

Yet somebody is claiming ownership of His Girl Friday, which is maddening. It’s freely available, even on YouTube itself. (If you haven’t seen it, you should definitely watch.)

Why that meant we got taken down but the above video didn’t, I’ll never know. But whoever filed the claim is a jerk, and there’s absolutely nothing we can do about it.