So this morning, four days after our entire YouTube channel was deleted at the behest of the BBC, and after days of wrestling with YouTube’s shambolic robot-staffed admin maze, we finally managed to get an email out of them with the full list of what the BBC had complained about.
(If you should ever find yourself in a similar situation, we recommend contacting @TeamYouTube on Twitter, who appear to be actual human people and can eventually prod the robots into action.)
The signatory was a London-based BBC lawyer, who’d plucked 13 videos apparently at random from the hundreds on our channel and decided to whine about them (citing US copyright law, rather than UK) up to four and a half years later.
There was no rhyme or reason to the selection, and no obvious link between them:
This one from February 2014, of Alex Salmond.
This one from February 2014, of London pundit Steve Richards being a pillock.
This one from June 2014, about BBC hypocrisy and Clare Lally.
This one from September 2014, of ex-European Parliament President Pat Cox.
This one from March 2015, of Ian Murray making a tit of himself.
This one from August 2015, of John McTernan arguing with Owen Jones.
This one from August 2015, of Gordon Brown doing a funny dance.
This one from February 2016, of Ken MacIntosh cooing over Laura Kuenssberg.
This one from May 2018, of me actually appearing on a BBC politics show.
Three that we can’t identify, here, here, and here. The second one, “John Loves Tony”, definitely features John McTernan again, and the others MAY be related to Kezia Dugdale, but we can’t be certain. If anybody can figure out any info about them we’d love to hear it.
And just for fun, a single track from New Order at Glastonbury 2017.
Finally armed with the relevant information, we’ve filed a FIFTH counter-notification with YouTube in respect of all 13. As far as we can tell, the BBC now has 10-14 business days in which to actually initiate court action to block the videos, or they’ll be reinstated (and presumably the rest of the channel along with them).
It’s going to be pretty interesting to see whether they do.
