YouTube Gets a Copyright School for Frequent Offenders
and it’s a joke…
Given how easy YouTube makes it to share videos, it doesn’t come as a surprise that this ease of use also means many of its users run afoul with copyright law. Until today, the site had a very simple three-strikes rule: after three uncontested copyright notifications, a user was banned from the service. Now, however, YouTube is getting something that’s more akin to the mandatory classes DUI offenders often have to take before they can get their driving licenses back. Users with a “solid demonstrated record of good behavior over time” can get their copyright strikes removed if they complete the YouTube Copyright School.
It’s worth noting that not everybody will get a chance to just take the quiz and get a copyright strike removed from their YouTube record. According to YouTube, this will only happen “in certain limited circumstances” – though it’s not clear how exactly YouTube defines this.
So how hard is it to graduate from Copyright School? You have to watch a 5 minutes long Happy Tree Friends video and then correctly answer three out of four questions about copyright law. That’s it.
The video is actually pretty informative (assuming you have never heard anything about basic copyright law before) but getting three out of the four questions at the end right isn’t exactly rocket science, so I can’t help but wonder why YouTube is making it so easy for repeat offenders to pass this test.
