The phrase "this video is no longer available due to a copyright claim by *insert name of company*, (Sorry about that.)" has become a well known sight on YouTube, even with Team Four Star, who put a disclaimer at the beginning of every episode they post. The Warner Music Group has also been responsible for taking away music from videos, saying that it violates copyright. If a video gets blocked for copyright infringement, the user who posted that particular video would usually get a copyright strike and would be forced to watch the Happy Tree Friendsvideo about copyright law and take a trivia question. If a user gets three strikes, their account will be banned and all of the user's videos will be removed from the site.
Announcer in YouTube Copyright School: Even though YouTube is a free video sharing site, you can still get into serious trouble for copyright infringement. You can be sued, and found liable for monetary damages. You could lose your booty, or worse: You might lose your YouTube account. You only get a few chances. If YouTube receives a valid notification of alleged copyright infringement from a copyright holder for one of your videos, the video will be removed in accordance with the law. You will be notified via e-mail and in your account and you'll get a strike. If YouTube finds you are a repeat offender, you'll get banned for life!
In general, YouTube videos that feature copyrighted content tend to get taken down very easily, even if they fall under fair use or (in rare cases) copyleft note legal technique of granting modification and redistribution over copies of copyrighted works with the requirement that the same or equivalent rights be preserved in derivative works or even public domain, due to a combination of the automated Content ID system, poor user help support and how easy it is for parties to file false or misconstrued copyright claims against these videos.
It doesn't help when there are some, who are heartless enough to file 3 strikes at once, as was the case with MagnatesMedia's situation with Business Casual.
Another phrase "This video contains content from *Insert Company Here* who has blocked it (in your country) on copyright grounds" pops up a lot, one variant lists multiple companies and adds "one or more of which" before "has blocked it...". Sony Music, Warner Music and Universal Music do this a lot, and so do other media companies.
Certain videos have managed to avoid this fate by claiming Fair Use. Whether it's effective... varied.
YouTube has come under fire for the fact that they remove videos just because of an infringement claim without investigating whether the video is Fair Use or not. YouTube, and "Content Service Providers" in general, are required by law to pull without investigation as soon as they receive proper notice, or else they themselves can be Sued by the Lawyers. Uploaders can object to cases of "mistake or misidentification", in other words claiming that the copyright owner made a mistake when it failed to see that "it's legal Fair Use, damn it!"
One Machinima short was completely blocked by WMG specifically because of one short song clip used at the beginning of the video.
Curiously, there is a pattern that tends to emerge with what gets pulled and what doesn't, even aside from some content owners being more stringent about it than others: TV shows and movies (especially current ones) are the strictest, along with popular music (unless the artists deliberately use online distribution as free advertising). Music from other sources, though, tends to be less strictly enforced. Rarest of all to be cut are video game clips; since you can't actually play the game on YouTube, each video game clip is basically a trailer the producers didn't have to pay for. Also, AMVs are, for whatever reason, often kept in the same way Fan Fic in general is rarely targeted, despite theoretically having two possible angry claimants.
But since anyone can make a copyright claim, they don't need any proof that you are the copyright holder, and since they don't investigate any claims, anyone who just doesn't like someone's video or even a bot can file a false claim. To dispute the claim, you must provide unnecessary personal information (your full name, phone number, physical address, email address), meaning most people who are the victim of a false copyright claim would just not bother disputing. Even though YouTube tells people not to file false claims and that repeated false claims could get the person in legal trouble, that doesn't stop people from making them.
Paramount Global was possibly the worst offender; it was known to claim copyright to properties it didn't own, like Mass Effect playthroughs and even a Mass Effect video from BioWare's own YouTube channel, along with Meet the Scout from Valve's official channel (though the latter was restored shortly afterwards). They also claimed clips from Sesame Street that aired on Noggin, because they owned Noggin. And it had the Noggin logo on the bottom right. That is why a lot of Sesame Street uploaders such as JonnyTBird4789, Nantosuichoken, and many other users were terminated from YouTube.
Paramount has also become infamous for filing infringement claims against content uploaded by its own authorized agents. The fact that Paramount itself cannot reliably differentiate legally uploaded from illegally uploaded content contributed to the collapse of their suit against Google for YouTube content. They also took down the original 2012 pilot of Breadwinners, which was uploaded by the original creators before they even sold the rights to Nickelodeon.
Warner Music Group (yes, them again) is another notable offender. They have made copyright claims to properties that they didn't own, like shows done by Walt Disney Television Animation (such as Disney's Marsupilami, Raw Toonage, and many others....), and many Disney uploaders were banned from YouTube because of that. The same thing happened with Where In The World Is Carmen Sandiego; they claimed they owned the theme song by Rockapella. WMG also claimed Sesame Street at one point.
After acquiring The Beatles' recordings in 2012 following their purchase of EMI, Universal Music Group began flagging and blocking any videos featuring their music.
Capcom and some other video game companies are starting to remove playthroughs and walkthroughs of their games, especially more recent ones, from YouTube.
Nintendo is a bit of an odd case. They never really had any issue with LP's of their games, but in May 2013 they suddenly began claiming full monetization rights for videos that use their content. For Let's Play channels that primarily use Nintendo games, such as The Runaway Guys and the Game Grumps, this new policy effectively crippled their income*Given that both channels continue to use Nintendo properties, however, it's possible that Nintendo has backed off on this policy.
BrawlBRSTMs3 and GilvaSunnernote the real Gilva, not the high quality ripper, two of the biggest gaming music archive channels on YouTube, both suddenly saw themselves getting hundreds of copyright claims en masse from Nintendo in August 2019, forcing the former to be terminated and the deletion of hundreds of the latter's videos. While Brawl had actually planned to announce their retirement that day (with the claims just giving them more incentive), Gilva was less pleased considering Nintendo had not uploaded much of its music to digital platforms, unlike Square Enix, Capcom and Namco, leaving him and many others to question why Nintendo was striking down their channels (among others) while giving fans no alternatives.
Also works re: preventing YouTube videos from working outside of specific countries.
My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic videos began getting hit hard by the year 2016. The year prior, Hasbro Studios made an agreement with Sony Music Entertainment to have the former's music catalog released by the latter. At first, fans thought that it was only applied to the Friendship Games special and the Christmas album the prior year, but it turned out the deal applied to the entire music archive of the series as well, meaning anything pertaining to the music of the series, remixes or not, would be targeted by SME. Fans soon declared war against SME believing their actions were unjust.
Jimquisition was hit by copyright strikes many times due to indie developers not being able to handle Jim's harsh criticism of their game and issuing a claim out of spite since they think their games are perfect. In almost every case, Jim files a counterclaim and the other party does not respond (they assume using scare tactics would work), which means Jim's removed video is reinstated after two weeks. Jim gets annoyed by this to no end since they're forced to answer quizzes from YouTube to see if they understand what copyright means and it disrupts their schedule for other content they had planned.
The one occasion when an indie developer responded to a counterclaim was when James and Robert Romine, of Digital Homicide infamy, sued Jim in 2016 over videos criticizing their shovelware games. During the litigation period, Jim's videos regarding Digital Homicide were brought down, and Jim was legally barred from discussing the matter in their videos, in addition to being forced to divide their time between fighting the lawsuit and making content. Eventually, however, the case against Jim was dismissed with prejudice: the Romines are no longer allowed to sue Jim on this matter again, and the case was dropped after Jim's lawyer explained to the Romines, in detail, the world of pain they would be in if they actually brought the case to court. After the sordid ordeal ended, Jim took the opportunity to rub all of the salt into the Romines' wounds.
Ubisoft began in early 2020 taking down videos of raw Just Dance gameplay, most likely to encourage more people to buy the Just Dance games instead of simply looking up a gameplay video and having a free workout of their own.
It's not uncommon for YouTube Poop to get hit with copyright claims. For instance:
All of Chickenpika's videos were taken down due to a copyright claim from a Troll posing as Michael Rosen. Chickenpika was able to successfully restore the videos after proving that Rosen did not actually make the claim.
cs188 said that he stopped making Poops of music videos because they kept getting hit with claims (such as a Poop of "Baby Got Back" that got hit the day it was uploaded). Also, in a non-copyright-related example, he took down "No one needs foundation repair", one of his most famous Poops, because of a privacy complaint from the foundation repair company whose commercial he used in it. As well, his own Michael Rosen Poops were taken down, presumably by the same impersonator who targeted Chickenpika.
Mark3611 had his original channel hacked, so he returned a few years later as "marck3611". That channel got hit with a copyright claim and hasn't been back since, thus meaning that some of his "later" Poops such as "The third wave of feminism" have not come back.
Creators
Achievement Hunter had a number of their Let's Plays stopped, started and stopped again due to Nintendo's ever-changing stance in using their material for Let's Plays.
James Rolfe changed the original show title The Angry Nintendo Nerd to The Angry Video Game Nerd to avoid getting into trouble with Nintendo. He took this opportunity to make it a Meaningful Rename, though, and started reviewing games from other consoles along with the NES and SNES games he'd been reviewing up to that point.
Rolfe was asked by New Line Cinema to take down his movie review of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles III from YouTube and GameTrailers, not because they were offended by his review or anything, but because the film clips in the video were used without their permission. It was also omitted from the Volume 2 set for this reason. Therefore, only ScrewAttack and his company Cinemassacre's website host the review. Rumor has it that this event led to the proposedAngry Movie Nerd side series getting scrapped. Rolfe eventually uploaded an edited version of the review to YouTube in 2021.
This also caused the removal of his reviews of Super Mario Bros. 3 (which featured clips from The Wizard) and the Sega Master System game adaptation of Rocky (which featured clips from the movies), due to angry letters from both NBCUniversal and MGM/UA, respectively, regarding the videos' use of movie clips, again without permission. Both episodes are back up, but at the request of the studios, all of the movie clips were removed. Ironically, the AVGN episode covering the Nintendo Entertainment System tie-in game of Back to the Future did not get into any legal wrangling despite using clips from said movie, also another NBCUniversal property.
The YouTube and DVD release of the Ghostbusters trilogy and Dick Tracy episodes had the film footage replaced with title cards and stills respectively due to copyright issues. Additionally, the DVD release of the Back to the Future, Friday the 13th, Chronologically Confused about Bad Movie and Video Game Sequel Titles and Wayne's World were edited also for this reason.
This is what caused Channel Awesome to start its own site and now many years later, when Allison Pregler and The Nostalgia Critic's reviews of The Room (2003) got pulled for this very reason, fans got pissed. The Critic responded to the legal threats by posting a video that was basically an entire episode's worth of Take Thats against the individuals responsible. Luckily, Doug Walker successfully defended the videos as Fair Use.
Ironically, when The Room review was pulled, it was possible to find it uploaded by other people on YouTube.
A few videos from Channel Awesome were removed after direct threats by the rights holders: The Cinema Snob's review of Grizzly II (helps that the movie is unfinished), the Brows Held High episode on Crispin Glover's What Is It, and the only ones that got restored were the Obscurus Lupa and The Nostalgia Critic reviews of The Room (Doug Walker even retaliated by doing this).
On a related note, the tendency of The Nostalgia Critic and other shows which use copyrighted material under fair use to be taken down by YouTube's copyright system has become severe enough for Doug Walker to create the hashtag #WTFU (Where's the Fair Use?) in protest of this trope.
The Completionist was forced into a reboot when Jirard was given a request by his former partner Greg to remove all the videos that he was in, which numbered in the dozens. He decided to allow viewers to download the original videos until the start of September 2017 when he would remove them.
Two videos from DEATH BATTLE! have been hit with takedown notices. The first was the Sol Badguy vs. Ragna the Bloodedge due to fan art being used and the creator not being happy with what was being used for credit. The second was the remaster fight between Samus Aran and Boba Fett due to the Dance Party Ending using RWBY's "Shine". Both are back, but the Samus vs. Fett video has the music removed, sadly. note Ironically, RWBY and Death Battle are now both owned by the same company.
Jontron has mocked Disney for this a few times by depicting them as having an itchy trigger finger for delivering copyright strikes and an almost supernatural ability to deliver them within moments of the infringement. Not too far from the truth, actually. In his Disney Bootlegs episode it takes only a few minutes of talking to Bootleg Mufasa and Zazu before Bootleg Jacques delivers a Cease & Desist written on a scroll in Disney font. This segues into the meat of the episode as he explains China is a rich source of bootlegged Disney content as they're outside U.S. jurisdiction.
MisterDavie, a YouTube-based animator who did the infamous "Smile HD" music video and the animated adaptation of Cupcakes (Sergeant Sprinkles), had his works temporarily taken down. This was seen as a good thing by some of the MLP fandom who wasn't keen on his depiction of Pinkie Pie as a mass murderer.
The Mysterious Mr. Enter was temporarily banned from YouTube in January 2015 due to a copyright claim by either Paramount or 20th Century Fox. He was posting reviews of shows and they were under fair use, but those companies bypassed the fair use disclaimer and shut down his account. He then filed a dispute and two weeks later, his channel went back up.
In February 2021, Logan received a cease-and-desist letter from Nintendo, demanding that he stop using Nintendo characters in family-unfriendly situations. On February 13, 2021, after days of speculation by the fanbase over whether the letter was genuine or a fake sent by a disgruntled fan or Chilly, Logan confirmed that the letter did indeed come from Nintendo, who were fed-up with Logan putting their characters in family-unfriendly situations, going as far as to accuse Logan of using them to promote hate speech. Because of this, the Nintendo plushes could no longer be legally used and Logan was forced to wipe all traces of Nintendo and their characters from the SML brand, leaving only the older videos. This was taken further in March 2021, when a leaked chat between a fan and Logan on Instagram had him reveal that Nintendo also wanted all of Logan's channels taken down due to the older videos and their custom URLs, which can't be changed once they're set, still having Mario references in them. Following this, Logan moved activity once again and began remaking some of the older videos on a 4th SML channel. Furthermore, because the Mario and Rosalina puppets still look suspiciously like the characters whose plushes they replaced, Logan had to rename them "Marvin" and "Rose", while Black Yoshi has reportedly been renamed "Duggie" (some fans have suggested Toad be renamed to "Todd"). Not only that, Logan might retire in the future.
These changes has also begun to affect the non-Nintendo characters, as the Blue M&M's Officer also received a human counterpart for "The Mustache Problem" (though this puppet was well-received due to not falling into the Unintentional Uncanny Valley). The most-likely explanation is that Logan has become paranoid that other companies could come after him for using their characters in adult situations or for profit.
Team Four Star has a very interesting love-hate relationship with this trope and especially with Toei Animation. At least once a year, Toei will take down various episodes of Dragon Ball Z Abridged off of YouTube, which the team ends up having to fight to put back up (they can't do anything about the videos on their own site). There are rumors that Toei told Funimation to replace a portion from Dragon Ball Z Kai: The Final Chapters that was dubbed by TFS with the original dub audio and they've apparently been "graylisted" and can't actively work with Funimation for a while because of Toei, as Nick Landis revealed in a livestream. All this strikes contributed to TFS cancelling their plans for the Majin Buu Saga after Season 3 has been concluded.
Music & Radio (or whatever's related)
Drum Corps International pulled several pre-2000 finals performances from its Fan Network due to copyright issues involving composers of works performed during those shows. Affected composers include Leonard Bernstein, Chick Corea, Ottorino Respighi, Andrew Lloyd Webber, and John Williams. A few months later, DCI pulled the plug on the Fan Network altogether.
Groovy and Rythm were popular Discord music bots that were forced to shut down after receiving cease-and-desist orders from YouTube. As a result, all other music bots on Discord turned off the ability to play music from YouTube. Despite this, on January 31, 2023, Hydra, ProBot, and Green-Bot were also slapped with cease-and-desist orders from YouTube. Not even MEE6 was immune to this. On February 7, 2023, Hydra, ProBot, and MEE6 removed the ability to play music entirely.
Like many radio show hosts, Phil Hendrie allows website subscribers to download show episodes as podcasts. At some point, network lawyers decided that it was a copyright violation for podcasts to include music. This affected any skits that involved music, including his frequent parodies of Jim Rome's and Art Bell's shows that incorporated their respective "Welcome to the Jungle" and "Dancing Queen" theme songs, and his Running Gag of using the "Darth Vader Death March" as theme music for his fictional boss. The music in these cases was replaced by awkward silence, and if characters in Phil's comedy skits commented on the music, podcast listeners could not know what they were talking about.
VTubing network hololive used to be able to stream any game they wanted to. But when Capcom sent a copyright strike to Ookami Mio for playing Ghost Trick, a lot of streams had to be purged (at least set to private). Following that, network owners Cover Corp have to ask every single company for permission to play a specific game, even if it wasn't made in Japan. This has resulted in annoyance from members that want to play a certain game, but aren't allowed to. Especially from the English side, as they're used to much more open policies.
Atop the Fourth Wall has been hit with this. The series used to have the title cards use various music from various artists to match the mood of the book he was going to read. This ended with Linkara's review of Justice League "Secret Origins", using various remixes of the theme song. As well, reviews using various cartoons, movies and television shows tend to be clipped in such a way that it can get past the Youtube ContentID program.
The web series Adult Wednesday Addams, focusing on a grown-upWednesday Addams as she navigates twentysomething life in Los Angeles, got taken down after its creator Melissa Hunter received a cease-and-desist letter from Charles Addams' estate. Hunter laid out the situation here. Fortunately, some enterprising individuals have taken to reposting the series on other sites.
The Funday Pawpet Show cited issues with music licensing as one of the reasons for their decision to end the show initially, and was also the reason why they switched over to royalty-free/public domain music when they revived the show in September 2018.
In one case, Button's Adventures was taken down by a third party lawyer supposedly on behalf of Hasbro despite that they had no problem with any of the MLP characters used in fan properties that didn't damage the integrity (something that Buttons Adventures most certainly didn't.) Not only had the persons responsible since been fired, but talks were in order with JanAnimations (the creator) for a form of compensation.....but the talks didn't seem to work out.
That Dude in the Suede has had a long history of wrestling with Shogakukan-Shueisha Productions in regards to his Pokemon anime reviews, but what ultimately killed his channel was a particularly devious method of this trope on ShoPro's part. This time, not only did they copyright claim his videos, but they also formally charged him with "property theft" in Japanese court, demanding 80,000 yen (roughly 600 US dollars) in damages. As Suede himself stated, this effectively left him in a no win scenario; if he lawyered up and fought the charges, the resulting legal battle would financially ruin him, and if he did nothing, not only would his channel be deleted, but Japanese companies would now have legal precedence to use monetary compensation demands to have online videos and even entire channels that use their content removed.
Mystery Science Theater F1 had to be posted outside of YouTube, because its episodes would get blocked immediately upon upload.
From 2015 until 2018, host Ben Minotte was forced to re-edit several older episodes of the show starting with the “Teletext” episode to trim down (and remove/replace) portions of music and film/TV footage due to copyright issues with YouTube’s ContentID system. Despite the footage being under fair use, Ben has said the reason for the re-edits was due to him not having time to dispute the claims as well as keeping his channel from getting suspended. These re-edits would ultimately result in Ben using significantly less copyrighted footage in future episodes.
Additionally in the "PSAs" episode, Ben talked about the Rock Against Drugs ads from the 80’s. Though he refused to show footage from the ads due to their usage of copyrighted music.
The episode "1-900 ARCHIVE Vol. 2" initially ran into issues when it was claimed by "a certain billion-dollar wrastlin’ organization" for copyright infringement, even though there was nothing in the video that belonged to them (the segment they took issue with was a hotline ad for GLOW, who have no ties to WWE). It didn't help this claim came right on Christmas Eve, while Ben was getting presents and dinner for the next day ready for his parents. Not wanting to deal with claims during the holidays, Ben took the video down and reuploaded it, replacing the offending scene with a text-only transcript of the segment, as well as a major Take That! to WWE. Eventually, the claim was dropped when GLOW themselves took notice and ordered WWE to stop, allowing Ben to reupload the episode with the original segment intact.
The LaserKaraoke episodes have been, perhaps unsurprisingly, the most difficult for Ben to safely upload, as YouTube tends to flag the karaoke versions or instrumentals as coming from the actual real recordings, no matter how poorly-done they are. The majority of the episodes are fully intact on YouTube, but "Archive LaserKaraoke Party!" needed to be re-edited to trim down an offending portion. Ben would later quietly end the sub-series when "Vol. 7 (Golden Moldies)" was hit hard by the system; in protest, he uploaded a re-edited version that trimmed out every musical portion in the video, causing the video's runtime to go from 37 minutes to just 13, and the ending has a direct message to YouTube noting how his content falls under fair use and asking them to fix their content ID system.
One early episode of Red vs. Blue had to have the music on the Warthog changed for the DVD release because Rooster Teeth couldn't figure out who owned the music of the original version.
Renegade Rhetoric, a Character Blog for Cy-Kill from Challenge of the GoBots that had posts mainly consisting of Cy-Kill describing the events of episodes from a hypothetical second season, originally had a picture of Cy-Kill from the cartoon on the page, but Hasbro apparently warned the staff that Warner Bros. still owned the rights to the likenesses of the characters that were used in the cartoon (owing to Challenge of the GoBots being produced by Hanna-Barbera and Warner Bros. being the current owners of most Hanna-Barbera cartoons) and so the picture was quickly replaced with a cropped image of Cy-Kill's Continuity Cameo in Transformers: TransTech.
Sabaton History's episode for the song "Talvisota" was copyright-struck by YouTube after it got caught in a legal dispute between the Finnish government and Reuters over the rights to video that producer TimeGhost History had licensed from the Reuters archive. The studio contacted the Finnish government to appeal the decision and got the strike removed.
Star Trek Continues was once hit with a copyright strike from YouTube. It was apparently filed by a third party, as current rights-holder CBS told YouTube to drop it and put the series back up. Vic Mignogna is quite proud of his good relationship with the company, which he attributed in an interview after Prelude to Axanar was infamously sued to 1) checking in with their legal department on a regular basis and 2) keeping firmly in mind that he's not supposed to be making money off of the web series.
In March 2023, his side-channels where he posted full episodes of the French and Japanese dubs of Thomas & Friends were taken down by Mattel. Unfortunately, this affected all of his YouTube accounts on the same email, so his main channel was terminated and he had to make a new one.
His reupload of the Thomas and the Magic Railroad review on his replacement channel was taken down by Sony and Mattel on copyright grounds. This is despite the review having had no such problems when it was initially uploaded on his original channel. He would eventually manage to reupload the video again with no issues, albeit at the cost of having to re-edit and censor some parts in order to avoid further takedowns.
"EVERY Callback in CGI Thomas" had to be delayed by a day because it kept failing copyright checks. In order to get the video public, he had to shrink all the footage of The Adventure Begins and put it against a pixelated background.
Websites
Many online scanlation sites have removed their archived scanlations because of attitude shifts from some publishers. In fact, quite a number of them have been shut down or censored due to publisher pressure.
Card Conjurer, a website for making custom Magic: The Gathering cards, was shut down after a cease and desist from Wizards of the Coast. It was only able to come back as a site for making generic cards, with the Magic material removed.
Gaia Online's relationship with tektek.org: It's more like Executive Meddling (as this apparently happened post new management), many users think of the site Tektek.org being taken down to be a result of this, as Gaia execs sent a C&D letter to the user, Tekton (the creator), despite the website having existed for as about as long as Gaia did and even having an Approval of God (the FAQs even and possibly still having a link to the website). According to what's been heard, the reason for the C&D was because of banner ads (one of which was an ad to Tekton's site, "recolor.me").
In February 2018, Google removed the "View Image" button (which links directly to the image) from its Image Search results as part of a new licensing agreement with Getty Images, arguing that the feature helped to induce copyright infringement by users. However, the right-click menu still works and allows direct linking and downloading of the images, thus allowing users to still indulge in said copyright infringement.
Even wikis are not safe from this trope; for months, the fanmade wiki for PJ Masks was not allowed to have articles for the characters Armadylan and the Wolfy Kids, due to a copyright claim by Entertainment One back when these characters were about to make their debut on the show. What made this example even stranger was that Entertainment One apparently had no trouble with everything else that was on the wiki, and that during the ban the Disney wiki, which also has articles on PJ Masks and associated characters since the show is broadcasted on Disney Junior, did have articles on these characters, seemingly without receiving a similar copyright claim. The ban has since been lifted.
Etc
Since Kids II started owning the Baby Einstein Company in 2013, most of the time YouTube uploads of the videos that weren't from the official Baby Einstein channel would usually get instantaneously blocked and copyright-claimed upon upload (most fan-made content from other users were typically exempt). However, starting on December 19th, 2022, various fan-made creations and other such videos would start getting blocked and trademark-claimed after one such user got slapped with a cease-and-desist. Most users started combating this by marking all such videos private for the foreseeable future, while others have been backing them up via different means.
This trope didn't kill The Film Crew outright (via Jim Mallon threatening to pull the MST3K license from Rhino Entertainment if they worked with the project), but it definitely made things more difficult; Nelson, Murphy, and Corbett eventually moved on to RiffTrax, which was much easier to produce.
Jim Mallon explained that the reason he didn't want Rhino producing The Film Crew, was they'd be spending money on b-movies for The Film Crew, when they could be using whatever money they had for b-movies shown on MST3K (MST3K only secured temporary rights to their movies while the show was on the air, and the rights have to be re-negotiated for DVDs. It's not easy, or cheap).
RiffTrax itself is essentially immune to this trope due to a variation of style, however: they don't release the movies in any form, they merely release tracks of the cast talking about the movies. Obviously, the original copyright holders don't have any claim over things people choose to say about their films. (There are some movies available as pre-synced tracks, but they fall into two categories: either films that are public domain [primarily shorts — one source for them are public domain archives], and B-movies that they can afford to buy the rights to.)
Browser Games
Moshi Monsters had to take down its character Lady Goo Goo and her music video "The Moshi Dance" and scrap the next planned music video "Peppy-razzi" after Lady Gaga's lawyers won a lawsuit against them claiming people would get confused and think the character was endorsed by her.
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