The influential conservative website Legal Insurrection lost its YouTube channel on Thursday when the video sharing service removed it based on "multiple third-party claims of copyright infringement."
Legal Insurrection lost hundreds of videos, including several original videos that it created, according to a post on the website.
The post said Legal Insurrection never received any claims of copyright infringement and that YouTube did not originally inform them about which videos caused the channel to be taken down. However, there was an update to the post on Friday morning that said the copyright claims were filed by the Modern Language Association based on excerpts of audio that Legal Insurrection obtained of pro- and anti-Israel speakers at the MLA annual meeting, which the site previously reported on.
Despite the copyright claims, Legal Insurrection intends to legally fight Youtube. The conservative site questions that MLA owns the copyright for the oral presentations at the annual meeting, and they believe the audio used on their YouTube channel was well within fair use. Legal Insurrection went on to accuse the anti-Israel activists at MLA of trying to silence their reporting.
The MLA Delegate Assembly was voting at the time on multiple resolutions, including whether to boycott Israeli universities. The boycott effort failed.
Legal Insurrection founder and publisher William Jacobson told Fox News that he believes YouTube's removal of the channel was politically motivated.
"Clearly this was a politically motivated move," he told FoxNews.com. "I never received any request or complaint from MLA. These were perfectly legitimate fair use excerpts with great news value."
"This is an attempt to silence our reporting on a matter of great public importance," added Jacobson, whose website covered the MLA meeting at which the group voted on a number of resolutions related to Israel. "We intend to pursue all available remedies, and call on YouTube to restore our account."
In response to the copyright claims, Legal Insurrection submitted a counter-notification challenging YouTube and MLA to get its YouTube account restored:
Please consider this a Counter-Notification, as provided under the YouTube guidelines, https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/6005919 and https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/6005908, in response to a group of copyright complaints filed with YouTube by the Modern Language Association (MLA) as set forth in your prior email.
We are not aware of any copyright held by any party in connection with the videos, which consist of portions of oral remarks made by several speakers at a meeting. Any copyright that could be claimed would be owned, if at all, by the speakers themselves unless assigned by them to the MLA. MLA in its copyright complaints to YouTube claims to own the copyright itself, not an assignee. Neither the MLA nor any speaker alerted us to any copyright claim or provided us with a copyright registration.
Moreover if there is a bona fide prima facie copyright claim, our use is a fair use because it consists of less than 15 minutes of material, cumulatively for several 1-2 minute excerpts, from a two hour original MLA collation of these speakers' remarks thus constituting a small portion of the material. Furthermore our posting constitutes comment or news reporting in connection with an issue of public interest. We reported on this news event here, http://legalinsurrection.com/2017/01/massive-defeat-for-bds-at-modern-language-association/. Additionally the use will have no affect on the "market" for the original work, which is non-existent.
Since we vigorously dispute the copyright claims, which were filed in a single bunch, and previous to this had no violations of YouTube's Terms of Service or the Copyright Act, we request restoration of the account pending resolution of these specific claims.
Legal Insurrection will be represented by the prominent intellectual property and free speech lawyer Ron Coleman.