The DMCA is a sweeping law enacted in 1998 that is vitally important to the ways the internet has grown and is governed. At the bottom of the Google search results, however, I saw a notice: “In response to a complaint we received under the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), we have removed 1 result from this page.” I Googled “Harlem Shake Poop” and found a series of YouTube videos of people reacting to Blippi’s original video (think of the 2 Girls 1 Cup reaction video genre), but not the original video itself. 'For another thing, filing a takedown notice hardly qualifies as going to 'extreme lengths.' Then again, the fact that you can call BuzzFeed’s piece about a six-year-old gross-out comedy video 'a blockbuster investigative report' with a straight face may suggest that journalistic standards aren’t what they used to be.'Īfter reading Notopoulos’s article, I naturally went searching for the video. 'It wasn’t BuzzFeed’s reporting that led me to try to get the video taken down I’ve been doing that for years, pretty much whenever and wherever I find it up somewhere,' Blippi told Motherboard in an email after this article was originally published. I swear under penalty of perjury I am authorized to act on behalf of the owner that holds the exclusive right of the Harlem Shake Poop video that allegedly infringed.” The information in this notice is accurate. This Russian site is illegally storing the videos on their servers and your search results have indexed them. “This video was not authorized for use on the links provided.

“The copywritten work of ‘Harlem Shake Poop’ is of a NSFW video of one man defecating on another,” the takedown request reads. In early January, someone claiming to represent Blippi filed a copyright takedown request with Google, which previously had linked to a Russian website that host the so-called “Harlem Shake Poop” video. And certain internet artifacts can be actively cleaned up and legally protected, which is how a video that was actively promoted and went viral in 2013 (“PLEASE ENJOY AND SHARE THIS AMAZING VISUAL ART PIECE WITH YOUR FRIENDS & FAMILY,” Blippi wrote on at the time) can suddenly become pretty difficult to find in 2019.īuzzFeed reporter Katie Notopoulos did not link to, embed, or otherwise share the Harlem Shake Poop video in her piece, noting that “an attorney for sent BuzzFeed News a cease and desist letter asserting copyright on the video.”īuzzFeed isn’t the only company that got a legal notice about the video’s copyright.

The harlem shake poop edition