A teenager from Western Australia claimed to YouTube that a whole bunch of Australian Broadcasting Corporation clips from their show “The Chaser’s War On Everything” were in breach of copyright, and had to be taken down. YouTube duly did so, but then discovered that the kid wasn’t representing the ABC at all — it was a hoax. Indeed, the ABC then told YouTube to put the content back up; that they wanted to get it “out there” as much as they could.

An investigation showed the form sent into YouTube, which was filled-in by hand, and claimed to be acting on behalf of the “Australian Broddcasting Corperation“, with a Hotmail address given as a contact point. John Beohm writes that YouTube then apologised to the individual posters whose videos had been pulled.

In these days of the DMCA, it certainly makes a nice change for the copyright-holder to recognise that the more people see their content, the better, and I suppose it’s not surprising that YouTube is skittish, but a little basic checking of the facts wouldn’t go astray.