Samsung Issues Takedown On Video Of Grand Theft Auto 5 Mod Turning Galaxy Note 7 Into A Weapon

from the that's-not-a-copyright-issue dept

GTA 5 Mod Showcasing the explosive Samsung Galaxy Note 7. You can blow people up with a Samsung Galaxy Note 7 in GTA V.

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Another day, another weird copyright takedown for censorship rather than legit copyright reasons. Adrian Lopez alerts us to a YouTube video that no longer exists at that link. If you go there (as of right now), you get this:If you can't quite read the text up top, it says "This video is no longer available due to a copyright claim by Samsung Electronics America, Inc. and its affiliates."What that video used to be, according to the original description was:And there's the little thumbnail thatshown in the Twitter card for the video before it disappeared:In case you still don't get what's going on here, let's lay it out for you: there's a big story going on these days about how Samsung's Galaxy Note 7 devices are, well, catching fire (some prefer exploding, but it seems that they're mostly just setting themselves on fire). It's causing injuries and Samsung is in full on panic mode. It's now a felony to bring a Galaxy Note 7 on an airplane. This is the kind of stuff that business school case studies are written about years later, describing how Samsung handled this kind of crisis.GTA 5, of course, is the video game Grand Theft Auto 5. And, like many video games, it's possible to mod (modify) those video games to add in other elements. And so it appears that someone took the "ripped from the headlines" stories of exploding Note 7s and created a GTA 5 mod that made such things into weapons you could use in the game.It's kind of funny, actually.What it is, however, is copyright infringement. I don't care how you slice or dice it. It's not copyright infringement. Samsung may beby its exploding devices, and it may not like people making fun of them or turning them into weapons in video games, but. There's no copyright infringement against Samsung's copyrights in doing that. And it's flat out ridiculous that Samsung appears to have made a copyright claim over such a video. Hopefully whoever put up the video challenges this and YouTube comes to its senses...

Filed Under: censorship, copyright, galaxy note 7, grand theft auto, mods, takedown

Companies: samsung, youtube