The May 14th episode of Family Guy made reference to the classic NES game Double Dribble. The show made fun of a glitch in the game that allowed the player to exploit the corner 3 point shot, that when released with the right timing, would go in no matter what. The clip they used in the show was ripped from a YouTube video uploaded by a YouTube user named sw1tched. After the episode aired, the original YouTube clip was taken down for copyright violation, despite the fact that the video was uploaded about 7 years ago. This copyright claim also overlooked the fact that the game Double Dribble itself was released by Konami in 1986.
According to the updated description on the video added by sw1thced the video was used “without [their] knowledge or consent.” This quickly caught the attention of anti-DMCA abuse group takedownabuse.org who quickly took issue with the copyright claim and mentioned it on their website. On takedownabuse.org’s website they stated “FOX stole a gaming clip, used it in The Family Guy and then issued a DMCA takedown on the original YouTube video” The group is actively taking issue and bringing light to these problems with YouTube’s automatic copyright system and the various large corporations they feel are abusing this system. The media attention this issue got even prompted Seth Macfarlane to respond to the issue. Reminding people that he “does not run Fox” and that he would try to work out the issue. The original video has since been restored.
This is not the only copyright issue to come out of this episode of Family Guy, as another YouTube user had their video of Tecmo Bowl, which was also used in the same episode of Family Guy, taken down. Their video was also restored after the issue was brought to light.
These recent events bring into question the effectiveness of Youtube’s content ID system, Whether or not a company is justified in using someone’s content because they licensed the original property. It also brings into question intellectual property as it pertains to digital media.