Want a video removed from YouTube? Send along a fake takedown notice pretending to be from the copyright holder. At least, it’s a prank that worked for a 15 year old from Perth, Australia, who sent a signed form to YouTube pretending to be from the Australian Broadcasting Company. The form requested the takedown of hundreds of clips from “The Chaser’s War on Everything”.

(More: http://mashable.com/2007/04/14/youtube-takedown/
You can digg this at: http://www.digg.com/tech_news/YouTube_Obeys_Fake_Takedown_Request_From_15_Year_Old
You can blog about this: now ;)

"15-Year Old Googler" from last year...
http://blogoscoped.com/archive/2006-03-13-n78.html

Michael Crook vs. DMCA
http://www.google.com/search?q=michael+crook

I was that show's fan for a while...

I don't know how it works because he is in Australia, but the American law makes quite clear that lying about this is big trouble. You have to swear, under penalty of perjury, that you have a good faith believe your copyright is being violated.

What email address did he use? I wonder if Google would fall for this if I sent it from hiprocker18aol.com...

I think the main point here is that people forget that Google is just a company. In terms of cost/benefit, they have much more to lose from obeying a fake takedown request (a false positive) than ignoring a potentially real one (what could be a false negative). While I agree that they could put more effort into verification, I completely understand why they would be prone to remove videos.

From ABC's website...
<<The ABC grants you a licence to download these audio-visual files for your *private, personal, domestic, non-commercial use only*.>>
http://www.abc.net.au/tv/chaser/war/vodcast/

Not sure if that means they are encouraging users to spread the video...

Eytan Buchman: Wait, are you sure you don't mean the other way around? As in, "Google has much more to lose from ignoring a real takedown notice than obeying a false one"? As that seemed to be your point.

I thought this was funny, upon reading it. Though I suppose it's less funny for those that got takedown notices.

Well, if this doesn't show that Google is serious about enforcing the rights of content owners nothing does. Of course, that could have been the intent... but things get so confused if we assume everyone is evil.

Haha, I should do a one fake. Funny.

Mysterius:
Yea, I meant much less to lose. 3 AM comments are no fun.

As far as false positives go... I dunno, Google has something to lose when the Australia Associated Press circulates a story to all its newspapers that makes YouTube look bad... then again they say any news is good news, maybe it even got some kids to check out YouTube for the first time :)

myae this also shows, that google does not have a proper Due dilgence process in play..

They maybe the best of engineer's ..but as a business entity it seems that they are getting pulled and pushed all over .. Their business practices suck!!