The anti-Scientology videos that were pulled from YouTube a few days ago have been reinstated after a successful claim of DMCA abuse.
YouTube may be rethinking their process for handling DMCA takedown notices this week, after receiving thousands of bogus notices alleging illegal content on the site. According to the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), over a period of 12 hours, from Thursday night to Friday morning, YouTube received over 4000 notices, all for content critical of the Church of Scientology.
The notices were sent from an organization by the name of American Rights Counsel, LLC. However, Scientology detractors associated with the group Anonymous noted that no such limited liability corporation exists in the U.S. and that the text of the takedown notices is virtually identical to previous efforts from Wikipedia contributor oschaper, thought to be someone named Oliver Schaper (oschaper on Wikipedia and message boards). It’s possible that this individual was behind the notices, also filed by another apparently non-existent entity called ContentFactory America.
I feel that the detractors were well-prepared for this because of Scientology’s well-known efforts to abuse copyright law to censor material. Sadly, I don’t see many others being to prepared to deal with such abuses by other institutions.