Storyful Scam: Copyright Claims on Youtube

I received a message from YouTube about a bogus copyright claim on one of my videos. The incident smacks of copyright troll behavior.

The claim identifies itself (above) as coming from “Storyful Managed.”

This is about a video I made breaking down and analyzing the details of Tiger Woods’ DUI arrest in Jupiter back in 2017.

The claim was resolved in my favor after I disputed it. As such the details of the claim are now hidden from me by YouTube. Before that it did not provide a lot of detail but indicated that the supposedly copyrighted material was around 20 minutes into the video.

The only content in this video is me talking, sometimes with my face and mostly me talking over a lot of clips from the police dashcam video. Police dashcam video is public record and is not copyrightable.

There is nothing in this video that could even remotely look like it belongs to any copyright holder other than me. The message indicates the video was identified by Content ID. This means there was some kind of computer analysis that connected my video with a video uploaded by Storyful.

Storyful has had a partnership in the past with Google and YouTube, and has a YouTube channel with over 100,000 subscribers. As a result of that, I doubt YouTube will hold Storyful accountable.

For an interesting post about a similar experience someone else had, see this article on PetaPixel.

The deeper problem with this is that many people will not dispute these bogus copyright claims. The genuine publisher may not be paying full attention, may be scared or intimidated, or may just not be comfortable completing the dispute process. As a result malicious players like Storyful end up getting revenue from the videos by making these bogus claims.

I’d like to hope that complaints like mine would get noticed and YouTube would hold Storyful accountable for making this bogus claim. But I doubt it.