SpaceX launch footage was taken down thanks to bogus copyright claim

Enlarge / The Falcon 9 rocket climbs to space on Saturday. (credit: Trevor Mahlmann)

This weekend's launch, in which SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket successfully propelled the Crew Dragon spacecraft and the two astronauts on board from Florida safely into space, was amazing, awe-inspiring, and frankly, just plain cool to watch. And here in the age of inexpensive, tiny high-definition cameras and streaming content, it should be easy to catch up on it if you missed it-or even if you just want to watch it again for fun. But for most of the weekend and into this morning, you couldn't watch it at all, thanks to copyright content ID bots working overtime.

The May 30 launch was streamed live to NASA's YouTube channel and then archived, along with several shorter clips and highlights taken from the day-long livestream. NASA footage, like photo and video from other government agencies, is generally published into the public domain, not under copyright, and other entities can mirror or rebroadcast it. National Geographic also covered the launch, and its footage incorporated some of the NASA content. Then things got stupid.

By Sunday, the archival NASA video was no longer available to view, Twitter users spotted, because of a copyright claim from National Geographic. Attempts at that time to play back some of the NASA videos resulted in an error message saying, "Video unavailable: This video contains content from National Geographic, who has blocked it on copyright grounds."

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