Early last week, a few of the Youtube content creators received complaints for the content they posted regarding copyright issues against Microsoft. Chris Pirillo, founder of LockerGnome, was one of them who suffered from the issues; he started talking about what has been happened to him on social media with a hashtag ‘Microstopped.’
Image credit: Chris Pirillo
So here’s what #microstopped basically was: Microsoft had a company call Marketly to create a bot (or something similar) to go on to Youtube and scan for stolen product keys that appear in the video comment area. The bot wasn’t coded in a proper way and flagged a lot of people who mentioned Microsoft in their comment. However, the thing is what can you really do about how people want to comment?
What’s interesting is Microsoft did not mention anything about the #microstopped action, so there were people who had no idea what went wrong with their video. Plus there wasn’t really a way for them to go back and find out because their video had already been shut down. Some Youtube users even lost the ability to live stream or post lengthy videos on their channel due to being #microstopped.
Microsoft claimed later that the issues were not intended:
“While we are still investigating the recent YouTube takedown notices, it appears some of these videos were inadvertently targeted for removal because there were stolen product keys embedded in the comments section of the videos. Our intention was not to target legitimate YouTube content and we are sorry for the impact this has had. We have already taken steps to reinstate legitimate video content and are working towards a better solution to targeting stolen IP while respecting legitimate content.”
Fortunately, people were able to submit a counter notices back to Youtube and fought their channel back.
Have you or your content ever been wrongly flagged? Leave a comment for us here and share your experience.
