Usually, world famous artist Lady Gaga responds to today’s digital society in a clever way. She sells CDs like no other artist and her many shows are very well visited even though we live in a time of (illegally) downloading and artists consequently often (therefore) miss income.  Gaga knows how to gather a huge amount of fans on the internet. Recently, Lady Gaga even launched a new social network site called Backplane. Furthermore, she has 36 million Facebook friends and passed the limit of 10 million followers on Twitter, which is more than President Barack Obama. 

Last week, however, she messed up a bit, since YouTube temporarily blocked her account due to copyright infringement for showing a copyright protected fragment on her YouTube Channel without permission of the right holders. The fragment contained a clip of the Japanese television show "SMAP X SMAP", in which the singer released her new album. 

The creators of the show were not amused and filed a complaint. Subsequently, YouTube took the "Lady Gaga Official You Tube Channel” offline and the clip was removed. It is questionable whether this measure is proportionate, as the channel as a whole was taken offline due to (only) one complaint about a short fragment.

YouTube is aware of the importance of (protecting) copyright and maintains a "Notice and Take Down Policy", which nowadays many websites use to manage complaints on copyright infringements. Furthermore, YouTube has set up it’s own Copyright School. Do you think Lady Gaga should be sent to this YouTube Copyright School to learn from her mistake? 

Reference: Demorgen.be