Guinness World Records perjures itself.
Who would have thought the villain of the week would be Guinness World Records? Youtuber Karl Jobst explains in his video that Guinness World Records has been filing spurious copyright claims using video footage from world record holder Kosmic who last year obtained the world record for warpless speedruns on Super Mario Bros. for the NES. Kosmos beat the game without using any warp pipes in 18 minutes 59.856 seconds.
Kosmos allowed Guinness to upload the video to their channel, and then woke up to find many of his own videos had been copyright claimed by Guinness World Records. In fact because these speedruns for Mario Bros. are pretty much identical, a lot of people found their videos copyright claimed.
A representative from Guinness has posted on the video to apologize and blame the error on their Content ID system.
“Apologies to our record holders and anyone else affected. This appears to have been an error with automatic claims from our channel’s Content ID system. It should now be fixed and claims have been released. Sorry for causing concern, we know how distressing it can be to receive these notifications. ^Dan”
Perhaps bigger penalties for entities making false copyright claims such as losing the ability to make those claims in the future would incentivize organizations like Guiness to be less flippant and lazy with their claims.
MMO Fallout 