I have some first hand experience in all this. In fact still when I go to youtube the top of the screen informs me that
Your Account has been permanently disabled
And because of re-spawning cookies and my comcast, gmail, and hotmail addresses that is forever WITH NO RECOURSE. It also will not allow me to register or upload using any of those email addresses that I had used for different accounts. They also deleted everything that was okay in those accounts I had uploaded over the years. Hundreds of hours of work. And NO RECOURSE. That’s the kicker in all this.
It was VIACOM who began all this. On Youtube if there is ONE SECOND of anything they own it is deleted, NO RECOURSE. If you have several they delete everything and disable the account. I finally had to get on someone Else’s computer and use an online mail service I had not used before to get back on. Though on any computer running from my router I still get the PERMANENTLY DISABLED prompt.
In my case it was because of this Rush Limbaugh Character Matters Video
The reason it was deleted and my account permanently disabled was the original had the real PRETENDERS loop in the background which Rush Limbaugh uses. I finally found a midi of it to loop to foil Viacom – who owns most everything.
I would guess that that there were millions of videos that were deleted and accounts permanently disabled that used music as background for a video – which was fair use for many years. But after GOOGLE bought Youtube and Viacom forced their content finger printing software on them, ONE second of it and you are a criminal riding the rails. Viacom has been the leader in this ZERO TOLERANCE policing. Time Warner followed suit about a year later.
Just the millions of videos deleted on this one service is perhaps the most egregious form of quantity censorship in American history.
What SOPA and PIPA do is make it even worse by not only deleting the content, permanently disabling author accounts but adding to that the removal of the domain it is on from the net. And like most of these censorship issues there is NO RECOURSE.