err… i’ve had an account banned for “copyright violation” on youtube before and you’d be surprised at how asinine the whole process can be.
basically, you get three “strikes”. third one you’re out kinda deal. a single strike will not disappear from your record unless you have successfully disputed with all parties (yourself, the “copyright ‘holder’”, and youtube) the strike was unjust, or after six months of no further “violations”. now here’s a huge problem: there is no grace period between strikes. you can go to bed, wake up in the morning and find out some needle dick copyright “holder” doled out three strikes overnight and your account, along with all of the videos, are deleted. period. you can get two strikes in a week, then five months later upload something that has a sound clip of some song some big label company thinks it just might be theirs, and have your account deleted. it wouldn’t matter if you oblige and take down whichever video caused a violation - you still accumulated a strike.
here’s something more: whenever you’re given one of these strikes, youtube links you to a way you can supposedly dispute it… which they then turn around and say “go talk to the copyright holder”. they do NOT give you a way to contact the company or individual who made the claim against you. what’s worse? this shit is all completely unregulated. these copyright holders are allowed to dish out these strikes and warnings without any proof that you’ve done anything wrong, other than they think so. this is why you see people with COMPLETELY ORIGINAL WORK, have their accounts closed because MTV thought it came from their company, or Warner Bros. thinks it’s from a scene from one of their thousands of films. hilariously enough, real famous artists have had account seizures by their record labels because apparently they don’t own their own work.
the only way to truly ensure your account doesn’t get deleted is to remove all your videos for six months out of fear you’ll randomly get a third strike.
in my case of account deletion, i had videos of my friend and i playing a gundam game on the ps2. for over four years these videos were up with no issue at all, until one day i have two strikes in my inbox from Sony BGM of America and Sony of Japan. i jump through all the hoops to try and resolve the issue, send an email to the appropriate parties, only for two days later to have a third strike and 500+ videos deleted.
g-fuckin’-g
what more than likely happened was ov3rhead got a bunch of strikes that he couldn’t react to in time.