Yeah. In the middle of a two-plus hour video about cruise lines, there’s a clip — just a few seconds long — of a friend who joined Ellis on one of the trips singing karaoke. And that caused the entire video to come down while the “dispute” was adjudicated.

And, as Ellis notes, YouTube by default sides with the copyright holder, because the nature of copyright law is that it very, very, very strongly encourages intermediaries to side with the copyright claimant, even if that claim is obvious bullshit and clearly fair use (as is the case here). YouTube’s ContentID system is basically built with that in mind. Even as YouTube spent years fighting back against copyright maximalism and winning the massive DMCA case Viacom filed against it, in the end, to keep the big copyright holders happy, ContentID is really designed to strongly favor copyright claimants, even when their claims are bullshit.

The culprit in this case? Apparently our old friends at Warner/Chappell, which, let’s just say, have a history of this sort of absolute bullshit.

...

On Bluesky, Ellis points out that this wasn’t an automated takedown.