until your legal peril is resolved. If you in fact receive and cannot defend three strikes, your account is cancelled. When you get a strike, you can at that point protest the takedown notice with a counter notice, which is actually a formal legal notice to the other party. At that point, they can bring you to court because you have refused to remove their purported property.
The problem I encountered was that several hundred content providers decided that any match whatsoever was a violation of their rights, even if the material is already in the public domain (as is the case when government videographers film something but a network also films the same thing). In most of the cases where I received takedown notices, the producer was mistaken as to the ownership of the material or had granted the government perpetual license to use the material. In other words, these were works of the U.S. government.
For the first few years I started posting video, I spent considerable time beating back these false claims. By 2011,1 had beat back 325 Content ID claims on 5,900 videos. Only two of those were actually copyright violations: a 1927 silent film about Thailand and a 1940 Time, Inc. film that had been deposited in the archives with a donor restriction. The rest were all free and clear. I wrote up my results and sent them to David Ferriero, the Archivist of the United States.
Since 2011, the channel had been fairly quiet on the takedown front, though it continued to rack up millions of views. We had one dustup in 2014 over a Bob Hope Christmas special. The producer who ran Hope’s video company after he passed away got quite nasty with us and refused to back down. He claimed that the government had only received limited rights to use the Bob Hope Christmas Special, even though it was produced on an Army base in Vietnam at great government expense. I couldn’t find the initial contract they had with the government, so I removed the video.
Since I created the channel in 2007, people have spent a total of 207,066,021 minutes watching FedFlix. That’s 394 years of viewing time, not bad for videos that were previously sitting gathering dust in vaults.
My Island of Tears
It was thus a surprise in December to be sent back to Copyright School, this time over a formal takedown notice over a film produced by Charles Guggenheim called “Island of Hope, Island of Tears.” This beautiful story of Ellis Island and immigration to the United States was narrated by Gene Hackman and was being shown by the National Park Service. I had put the
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