Yesterday, I blogged about the tribute raised to Megaupload by several famous recording artists, who objected to their labels’ campaign against the service. Overnight, Universal Music filed a series of fraudulent copyright complaints against the song, prompting YouTube to repeatedly remove it, and to threaten to terminate the Megaupload YouTube account for incurring multiple piracy complaints.
Either Universal has done this deliberately, to stifle debate over its policies using false copyright complaints, in which case it would be social suicide for America to pass SOPA and give Universal the power to shut down any website with a fake copyright complaint.
Or perhaps Universal did this through blundering, inexcusable incompetence, a total inability to distinguish between the music it owns and the music everyone else owns. In which case it would be social suicide for America to pass SOPA and give Universal the power to shut down any website with a sloppy, erroneous copyright complaint.
Either way, Universal and its pals have demonstrated their absolute unfitness to wield power over free expression.
“Mega owns everything in this video. And we have signed agreements with every featured artist for this campaign,” Kim told TorrentFreak.
“UMG did something illegal and unfair by reporting Mega’s content to be infringing. They had no right to do that. We reserve our rights to take legal action. But we’d like to give them the opportunity to apologize.”
“UMG is such a rogue label,” Kim added, wholly appreciating the irony.
A few minutes after this exchange Kim contacted us with good news. After filing a YouTube copyright takedown dispute, the video was reinstated. But alas, just seconds later, it was taken down again.
“We filed a dispute, the video came back online and now it’s blocked again by UMG and the automated YouTube system has threatened to block our account for repeat infringement,” Kim explained.
Universal Censors Megaupload Song, Gets Branded a “Rogue Label”
(Thanks, anotherfreakinusername!)