Lofi Girl Goes Offline After Malaysian Record Label Files Bogus Copyright Claim
YouTube has since apologised.
Popular YouTube channel Lofi Girl has been hit with a DMCA takedown after Malaysian record label FMC Music Sdn Bhd reported the channel with false copyright claims.
As at the time of writing, two of the channel's most popular videos, “lofi hip hop radio - beats to relax/study to” and “beats to sleep/chill to” are still down and viewers are met with an error message that reads: "This live stream recording is not available".
The videos, which have a combined viewership of almost 800 million, are two of the go-to YouTube streams for people who want to listen to Lo-fi music while they work or study.
The lofi radios have been taken down because of false copyright strikes, hopefully @YouTubeCreators @YouTube will sort this quickly... pic.twitter.com/X01hL6jT2N — Lofi Girl (@lofigirl) July 10, 2022
As reported by Vice, the Lofi Girl channel tweeted on Sunday that its videos were taken down by YouTube due to a copyright claim allegedly filed by FMC Music, a music label based in Malaysia.
If a channel receives multiple strikes, YouTube will permanently remove it from the platform.
However, YouTube later confirmed that the takedown requests were abusive, and that it had terminated the claimant's account.
"We've resolved the strikes + reinstated your vids – it can sometimes take 24-48 hours for everything to be back to normal! so sorry this happened & thx for your patience as we sorted it out," YouTube said in a tweet.
This is not the first time the channel was taken down over dubious copyright claims. In 2020, YouTube removed the channel for violating its terms of service, but the platform later admitted that it was an error.
In 2017, Studio Ghibli filed a copyright claim against the channel for using a looping GIF of Shizuku Tsukishima, a character from the 2015 anime Whisper of the Heart.
The channel was restored after it replaced the image with the now familiar custom illustration of a girl wearing headphones and studying as her cat stares out the window at a cityscape.
