The NASA Curiosity team had to overcome many obstacles to land their robot safely on the surface of the Red Planet. But one obstacle they were probably not expecting to encounter was an accusation of copyright infringement.

The American space agency has been posting videos related to the Curiosity mission on its official YouTube page. But the Motherboard blog noticed that one of the videos had disappeared. In its place was the message "This video contains content from Scripps Local News, who has blocked it on copyright grounds."

NASA is a federal agency, and by law, works of the federal government are in the public domain. And in any event, it's hard to see how Scripps could own footage of NASA scientists celebrating Curiosity's successful landing in their own control room. So NASA complained to YouTube, and the video was restored within a few hours.

“We apologize for the temporary inconvenience experienced when trying to upload and view a NASA clip early Monday morning," a Scripps spokesman told Motherboard. "We made a mistake. We reacted as quickly as possible to make the video viewable again, and we’ve adjusted our workflow processes to remedy the situation in future.”

Mistakes happen. But "accidents" like this have become disturbingly common. Last month, an overzealous music publisher took down videos of Barack Obama singing a line from one of its songs (then, as now, YouTube eventually reviewed and reversed the takedown).

A NASA spokesman says that its content gets erroneously taken down about once a month. They've been asking YouTube to fix the problem but "it hasn't helped much." If a prominent federal agency like NASA struggles with unfair takedowns, what hope do the rest of us have of getting YouTube's attention when our videos are taken down?

Ducking the DMCA safeguards

Motherboard's headline blames the incident on the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, but we think it's more likely the takedown occurred under YouTube's Content ID program. That allows content to be taken down based on automated content matching. Crucially, bogus Content ID takedowns are not subject to even the weak sanctions provided by the DMCA. If a major content holder blocks your video on copyright grounds, you have no practical recourse. Indeed, some charge that appeals of Content ID takedowns are reviewed by the same company that initiated the takedown.

We've asked Google for comment on the incident, but we don't expect them to provide any details. Mountain View is extremely tight-lipped about YouTube takedowns. In the past, it has refused to even tell us (at least on the record) whether particular takedowns were accomplished using the DMCA, Content ID, or some other method. And on multiple occasions, the company has declined to give us details about how its takedown rules work.

That lack of transparency is a serious problem. Users whose content is targeted by major content companies should be offered a clear explanation of why the content is taken down. Users should have a way to contest takedowns and have those appeals heard by a neutral party.

Congress sought to achieve a balanced process with the DMCA's takedown regime. Some critics charge that regime was already too favorable to copyright holders. But with Content ID, YouTube has allowed major content companies to opt out of even the minimal safeguards of the DMCA. Content ID gives content companies the power to unilaterally remove content. There's no apparent penalty for those who take down content carelessly or recklessly.