My Twitter Account Was Suspended - Here's How To Avoid It Happening To You.

NOTE: This is a complex legal issue and I don't know all the intricacies behind it. I'm just doing my best to explain it to be helpful to others and let those who miss me on twitter know what happened. Please do you own detailed research if you want to know more about things like DMCA.

My Twitter account was suspended this morning. Here is the email I received stating why:

Hello,
 
Your account has been suspended as the result of multiple copyright infringement notifications.
 
If you believe that the materials reported in the copyright notifications were misidentified or removed in error, you may be able to bring your account back into good standing by seeking retractions or sending us counter-notifications to the takedown requests you have received.
 
We cannot offer you advice on whether certain content is authorized for your use or not, nor can we advise on whether to request a retraction or submit a counter-notification. You should consult with your own legal counsel if you have questions about these processes. It is your responsibility to know Twitter’s policies as well as whether or not you have the right to post material via Twitter’s services.
 
Retractions:
 
The DMCA notice that you received includes the contact information of the reporter. You may want to reach out to the reporter and ask them to retract their DMCA notice against you. The reporter can send retractions to [email protected], and should include the following information: identification of the material which was disabled (URLs), and a statement that the reporter would like to retract their DMCA notice.
 
Counter-notices:
 
For information about how to submit a counter-notice, see our Copyright Policy. Please be aware that a counter-notice is a request for Twitter to reinstate the removed material, and it has legal consequences. For example, submitting a counter-notice indicates that you consent to the jurisdiction of a U.S. Federal court and to the disclosure of your personal information to the reporter and Lumen website.
 
Best,
 
Twitter

Looking back through my emails I see I have received 6 of these DMCA notices over the past couple of years. Most of them are from this year.

Twitter appears to have a 6 strikes and you're out policy regarding DMCA issues. Whenever I would get one of these I would just delete the tweet and not think much of it, since my intentions were always good. I never used my twitter account to make any money. I'm not a spammer or a bot. My primary reasons for being on twitter are to connect with others, amplify the messages of those who deserve it, and to give any little boost I can to the lives of others by inspiring them, sharing knowledge, making them laugh.

Let's take a look at what these 6 tweets were...

#1) I tweeted a clip of the incredible U2 concert at Dreamforce 2016 that I was lucky to be in attendance at. Cell phones out and recording at concerts is the norm these days, so I didn't think twice about sharing this. I realize it doesn't make it right, however. "Everyone else is doing it" isn't a valid excuse. I deleted the tweet as soon as I received the message. Perhaps concert venues should have an obvious "no cell phone sharing" policy to enforce it up front, that would have prevented this issue for me.

#2 and #3) These counted as 2 DMCA complaints, but were the same content shared on 2 different dates. Note the credit given to the source for the beautiful drone footage he took in Hawaii. I listed his name, instagram and twitter accounts. Hawaii is a special place. I love to celebrate Aloha Fridays and try to spread the Aloha whenever I can. In this case it wasn't the author who complained, it was the fact that he had used a song called Roses by The Chainsmokers. I didn't recognize the background music, that was negligence on my part for not doing the research on that song. One interesting thing here is that I never mentioned anything about the song or artist in the tweet. This leads me to believe the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (“IFPI”) who filed the complaint is doing audio recognition on videos posted on Twitter. Perhaps they are scraping content and using some type of AI to find these things.

As you can see here in the detail of the above complaint, I was part of a bulk takedown request that included this song:

#4 and #5) Again I shared the same story twice and it counted as 2 violations. In this case it was a video segment about Namibian artist Max Siedentopf who set up an art installation in an undisclosed location in an African desert playing the song Africa by Toto forever powered by the sun. In the video segment you could hear a very poor audio quality version of the song playing from the device in the middle of the desert. Note the credit to the artist Max in this case in my tweet. Also note it was part of a bulk takedown request including many different songs by the IFPI. This one would have been easy to find as I mentioned Toto and Africa in the tweet itself.

#6) The final violation was a video I shared from CES 2019 where a Tesla Model S in autonomous mode has a collision with a Promobot. I thought this was a funny example of autonomous devices conflicting with each other. The problem here doesn't appear to be the use of Tesla or CES content, but I believe music playing in the background, as it is a takedown request from Universal Music Publishing Group (UMPG). This is the one tweet I didn't get the chance to delete when I got the request, since my account suspended when this one went through. You can see it was a bulk submission from UMPG including 6000 other tweets from other sources. Interesting again, this implies they may be scraping videos to do song recognition in the video content, since there is no music or artist title listed in the tweet.

Next steps for me?

I did email the folks that filed the DMCA complaints, and let them know my story behind what I did and asked for forgiveness, we will see if that goes anywhere. If they retract their complaints I believe twitter will re-instate me. I also emailed twitter and got the exact same automated response back that they sent me originally about my account being suspended. I understand the copyright issues behind what I did, I'm a bit surprised that deleting the tweets isn't sufficient when this happens. But I can see the problem that would create if bots were involved, they would just create more after deleting them. In my case I do believe these are mostly technicalities and nothing that is in the spirit of piracy, or trying to profit from the music content of the artists or companies that represent them. From the side of twitter I understand it must be hard to put perfect rules in place that can police social media at scale. I will see if they reinstate my account. In the mean time I will take a break from twitter and focus on many of the other important things in life I can spend my time on.

How can you prevent it from happening to you?

It appears from this policy if you do something as simple as share 6 clips from a music festival you are at risk of getting your account suspended as well. And multiple shares of the same content count as multiple violations. As you saw 4 of my violations came from 2 unique items. So if you have a single piece of content that is in violation that you really like, and share it 6 times over any period of time, you are at risk of getting suspended as well. If you want to be safe, scroll back through your twitter feed all the way to the beginning and delete anything with an artists name, or song title. Also any videos you may have posted with music playing in the background can cause you to get a DMCA violation as well. If in doubt, you could try the music recognizing tool Shazam to see if it recognizes the song. Just because it is in your history, doesn't mean you are safe. All of these complaints were from content I posted some time ago. There is a delay of sometimes a few months before you may receive a complaint. And they may stack up to where you get hit with many all at once.

Something similar happened to this guy as well, and in his case it was related to sports rather than music. https://medium.com/@4eyedmonk/so-my-twitter-account-was-suspended-7723ba7f54e0

So really you need to be careful about anything you share. It looks like music and sports are a couple of the hot spots, but I'm sure there are more. I'm not sure where the lines begin and end. For example what if you post a video of your friend singing karaoke? Acting in good faith and being a good person doesn't seem to save you, it seems to be more about technicalities and luck of the draw. Obviously the more you share the higher risk you are of this. I consumed content often and shared often, so I was high risk.

If you get one of these violations, try to clear it up right away with the person reporting it. Deleting the tweet doesn't make it go away. You have to email the reporter and see if they will retract it.

As I learned from 4eyedmonk's article above, there is a database of these DMCA violations you can search called https://lumendatabase.org/. A person who inspires me in Vala Afshar and I know he shares more great content than I do. As a result he has some of these DMCA issues:

I really hope he does not hit 6 violations like I did.

Evan Kirstel is another great guy to follow who shares a lot, and he has 4 violations he is in danger of this happening to him as well.

Thanks to all my friends on twitter!

Lastly I just want to thank all the amazing friends who have engaged with me over the years on twitter. It has led to many amazing experiences both on and off line, and has given me the chance to spread my impact greater than I could have without it. It really has been a great tool for me, and I hope to use it again in the future. If not, I look forward to interacting with you on other channels - especially real life!

Thanks,

@danieljpeter

UPDATE:

I did receive some emails from someone at the content protection team at Universal Music. It appears other platforms like YouTube, SoundCloud, facebook, Instagram and hundreds of other smaller ones have paid Universal Music license fees to be make it so when this happens on their platforms it isn't an issue. But Twitter has refused to license the content, so that's why it is an issue on Twitter in particular. Universal Music won't retract their complaint against me.