YouTube Video-Logger Allen Asch Kicked Off for Copyright Issues

Wow, what's the world coming to? One day, you're a small celebrity on the Internet, with more than 1,850 subscribers to your personal channel on YouTube and nearly 1 million viewings of your videos logged.

The next day, it's like you never existed.

This is the fate that hit one Allen Asch, a Sacramento man who went by the penname LiberalViewer on the web. When Viacom demanded that YouTube, the popular online video site, remove more than 100,000 videos containing unauthorized content nearly two weeks ago, it meant that some of LiberalViewer's videos would soon be erased off the site.

However, Asch was surprised to find this week that his entire account has been wiped out. Only about one-third of Asch's sixty uploads to YouTube, included Viacom snippets, but all trace of his channel was erased.

"While I never set out to gain the popularity I have, I've invested hundreds of hours of my time, created a huge network of friends and subscribers, and gotten links to my videos from Web sites all over the world," Asch says. "None of those links work now, and I've lost access to the entire network.

For the past seven months, Asch has posted short news analyses, using brief clips from Fox News, CNN, and two Viacom-owned shows-The Colbert Report and The Daily Show with Jon Stewart-as jumping-off points for his political reflections. Ironically, one of the links to a LiberalViewer posting was on Comedy Central's own Web site, the channel that airs The Colbert Report and The Daily Show with Jon Stewart.

A YouTube spokesman said federal law requires that companies terminate the accounts of repeat infringers. "Our community guidelines on the site make it clear that users must own or have permission from copyright holders to post any videos," he says. "We take copyright issues very seriously."

Asch, a former public defender, is checking into whether his videos could be protected under the "fair use" doctrin, which gives media the right to run snippets of video to illustrate a news story or commentary. Whether a vlogger qualifies as a media body is up for debate, legal experts say.

Asch is not alone in seeing non-infringed work taken off during the recent Viacom purging. For example, a user named Matt Hawes had a video parody of MTV's The Real World taken down, though it was clearly labeled as a parody and didn't use footage or logos from the Viacom-owned show.

As part of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, YouTube is required to take down material when asked by the copyright holder. By doing so, YouTube absolves itself from liability for content posted by its users.

But many are worried both Viacom and YouTube have "cast too wide a net without making the legally required good-faith effort to make sure [content taken down] is actually infringing material."

YouTube's "terms of use" agreement states that an account can be suspended if any copyright violations are found, but nowhere does it say one's account could be deleted unless containing material such as pornography.

"I greatly respect and enjoy the products of both YouTube and Viacom, and I'm not looking for a confrontation with anyone," says Asch, later adding, "I feel like two big corporations are fighting without thinking about how their actions affect the little people like me."