‘Family Guy’ Kinda Sorta Fought The Law, And The Law Won

  For a while now, YouTube has been all kinds of shonky. That enforced buddying up with Google, the darn commercials that appear five times in a half-hour video (I’m on You-effing-tube, if I wanted to watch a movie trailer I’d be… watching a movie trailer), the copyright claim shenanigans… none of us have time for any of this BS.  

Copyright claims in particular are an issue across the ‘tube. When content includes the faintest nanosecond of audio or something else without permission, it gets a damn good smiting from the Internet’s rabid team of winged lawyer monkeys. That is to say, it’s removed. When this sort of heavy-handedness goes too far, the results can be freaking ridiculous.

Take a look at Family Guy last weekend, for instance. In one episode, Peter is getting his Double Dribble on. This 1986 NES basketball game had a glitch that allowed players to abuse the timing of button presses to shoot better, and Peter is seen embracing the cheat-tastic to win. Which is all well and good. The footage used of the game is the issue.

As The Independent reports, the gameplay was pulled direct from YouTube, as recorded by sw1tched back in 2009. Soon after it was seen in Family Guy, the YouTube video was blocked, and the usual copyright message displayed. Apparently, through some kind of Bizarro World logic, the footage was now Fox’s.

At this point, you could say things like, ‘What in the name of balls?’ and ‘enough shitting on the little guy already.’ You could, and you’d definitely have justice on your side. Don’t worry though, it was all a screw up and the original footage was soon restored. As Fox’s PRtacular department put it afterwards,

“The video in question was removed as a result of Fox’s routine efforts to protect its television show Family Guy from piracy. As soon as we became aware of the circumstances, the content was restored.”   

So all’s well. And now, the offending clip: