uTube, which is owned by leftist Google, has displayed its nasty bias against conservative thought, banning the influential law website Legal Insurrection from posting on the channel.
YouTube claimed the reason for the ban was copyright infringement claims, stating, “This account has been terminated because we received multiple third-party claims of copyright infringement regarding material the user posted.”
Legal Insurrection founder and publisher and Cornell University Law Professor William Jacobson was furious, telling FoxNews.com, “It’s very frustrating, it’s very scary, to have 8 years of content removed without a chance to defend yourself.”
Jacobson posted a statement alleging that the ban was triggered by anti-Israel activists. The statement read:
We never received any claims of infringement. We have lost hundreds of videos, including a lot of original content on important news subjects. You now will see disabled videos in hundreds of our posts . . . I just received notice from YouTube that the copyright claims were filed by the Modern Language Association based on excerpts of audio of pro- and anti-Israel speakers at the MLA Annual Meeting we reported on in this post, Massive DEFEAT for BDS at Modern Language Association. We intend to fight this both at the YouTube and legal level. It is highly questionable that MLA owns the copyright for oral presentations at the Annual Meeting, and even if it did, the limited excerpts we used from the nearly 2-hour video posted by MLA on YouTube are well-within fair use. What I think is really going on here is that anti-Israel activists at MLA complained to MLA that MLA had posted the audio on YouTube. MLA took down its own 2-hour video and now seeks to silence our reporting.
Jacobson told FoxNews.com. “Clearly this was a politically motivated move. I never received any request or complaint from MLA. These were perfectly legitimate fair use excerpts with great news value. This is an attempt to silence our reporting on a matter of great public importance. We intend to pursue all available remedies, and call on YouTube to restore our account.”
The Legal Insurrection website is visited by hundreds of thousands of visitors a month. Jacobson added, “We take copyright issues very seriously both on YouTube and our website. We have a large readership, and the videos that disappeared included substantial original content that has been shared widely at other websites.”
YouTube’s bias is becoming clearer and clearer; in October the channel started censoring videos produced by Prager University; 21 Prager University videos were placed by Google under “restricted mode,” which limited access to them for many schools and families.