One of the more baffling parts of the recent Viacom versus YouTube court revelations was the astonishing finding that executives from MTV and pals were ordering YouTube to take down videos that infringed its copyright - while their minions were simultaneously uploading those selfsame copies.
Even if we're being generous and it was merely a miscommunication between the media giant's different arms, it looked like a colossal cock-up at the corporate level that surely couldn't be repeated.
Think again.
Sony is proving that history just enjoys repeating itself by filing a copyright infringement takedown against one of its own artists, some unknown who goes by the name of Beyoncé. The incident, reported by a number of websites, appears to have been an attempt to stamp out unofficial uploads but in fact blocked videos on Beyoncé's official YouTube channel instead (at the time of writing, there didn't appear to be any more issues).
YouTube has had its fair share of scrapes with the owners of music videos, particularly in the UK, but incidents like this suggest that even today the record industry doesn't quite seem to be evolving. Music videos are, after all, adverts for the music and the artists they're selling. Who blocks adverts?
