High-Level Observations from the YouTube Takedown Requests in the Lumen Database
The Lumen Project operates with the motivation that good data informs good policy. Lumen receives copies of notices sent to a wide variety of different companies and while comparing them in the aggregate is fascinating, looking at just one company’s notices is also very interesting and may provide greater insight into not only the kind of content removal requests that the company in question receives, but also what motivated the users who sent them. YouTube’s notices are a great example.
Currently, YouTube shares with Lumen copies of takedown requests it receives in several different categories: defamation, trademark, counterfeit, and “other legal complaints.” YouTube does not share copyright-related takedown requests with Lumen at this time, whether made through either YouTube’s ContentID system or DMCA notices.
Between May 2020 and June 2021. YouTube shared with Lumen copies of 127,926 takedown requests. Of these, 27,363 were defamation notices, 33,893 were Counterfeit complaints, 29,725 requests were for the removal of trademarked content and the remaining 36,945 notices were ‘other legal complaints’.
The trademark complaints to YouTube available in the database are most often sent by or on behalf of video show producers, retail companies, and E-Commerce Platforms and businesses. The Counterfeit complaints to YouTube seem to arise out of the allegedly wrongful promotion of confusingly similar unauthorized variations of trademarked property. Senders of such notices include Whatsapp, Nike, Adidas, and weapons manufacturers such as Armament Systems and Procedures.
The defamation removal requests largely have to do with alleged violation of privacy rights or to prevent allegedly untrue statements from being made about the principal. YouTube does not always remove material in response to a request, and researchers can view those YouTube Links that stay up, such as this notice from January 2021, that requests the removal of a video that provides a college review. It would be interesting to learn about the internal decision-making process behind decisions about the fulfillment or non-fulfillment of removal requests.
Access to YouTube’s notices provides interested researchers an opportunity to develop a more informed understanding of the types of removal requests that a video creation and sharing platform receives and the sources of such requests. The Lumen Project encourages researchers, scholars, journalists, and academics who are interested in learning more about the notices or to work with the database to reach out for collaboration and researcher access.
