As I’ve noted in previous posts, it’s easy to get videos taken down on YouTube, harder to challenge the takedown. An FDA official may have taken advantage of this to censor videos he doesn’t want seen.

A Guardian article says:

Jonathan Howard, a neurologist and psychiatrist in New York City, received an email from YouTube on Friday night, which stated that Vinay Prasad, who is the FDA’s top vaccine regulator, had demanded the removal of six videos of himself from Howard’s YouTube channel.
 
The now-defunct channel contained about 350 videos of doctors and commentators, including Prasad, Robert F Kennedy Jr, the secretary of health and human services, and Jay Bhattacharya, the head of the National Institutes of Health, which had been collected by Howard from their social media accounts, interviews and podcasts.
 
Creating the channel, Howard told Guardian in an interview, had been an attempt to “preserve” what these individuals had said during the early years of the pandemic, including comments that Howard said exaggerated the dangers of the Covid vaccine to children and – in some cases – minimized the risk of Covid infection, among other issues.

Howard’s entire channel has been deleted by YouTube, which cited copyright infringement.

As I’m writing this, Howard’s YouTube page is unavailable.

The Guardian article reports this statement from the FDA:

All of Dr Prasad’s videos, that were illegally taken and published by another party, remain available for all to watch on YouTube. Publishing someone else’s videos without modification or commentary is a clear copyright violation. The mission of Johnathan Howard was not medical transparency, but personal profit by grifting and stealing someone else’s intellectual property.

The trouble is that Prasad’s copyright case may be legally valid. An article by Joe Lancaster on Reason.com argues that the channel should be protected as fair use, but fair use exemptions usually involve incorporating part of a copyrighted work for purposes of commenting or providing information in one’s own work. “Transformative” use is more likely to get fair use protection than simple reposting. As the FDA statement notes, they were posted “without modification or commentary.”

Here’s a discussion of fair use by someone who (unlike me) has real legal qualifications. Howard’s channel has some points in its favor. It’s for nonprofit educational use, not income generation. Prasad’s nonsensical claim about “personal profit” would strengthen the takedown claim if it were true, but it looks like nonsense. The videos consist of allegedly factual claims rather than creative work. The effect on the market for the videos seems tiny or nonexistent. However, reusing the whole video sounds like a big problem for a fair use claim.

YouTube’s takedown system is stacked in favor of copyright claimants, because it needs to minimize legal liability. Prasad seems likely to prevail, even if Howard contests the takedown. But his purpose seems to be not to protect his work from infringement, but to avoid embarrassment and intimidate anyone who reports his words.

If you’re going to use someone else’s video without explicit permission, don’t just repost it. Embed it in a video of your own which at least explains your purpose. The more original material you have, the better your chances. As my personal experience shows, you can successfully challenge YouTube takedowns, but you need to know what you’re doing.