Why Yahoo India using my tweet was a bad thing

With having access to high quality sports streaming i did simple cuts of the wickets in the first cricket test match of Australia vs India. Instead of cricket fans needing to go through the Cricket Australia website or Fox Sports website they simple could see the wicket in the Twitter app/browser.

It was a success, Indians love their cricket and some of the tweets had the classic snowball effect. Once it gets retweeted its exposure gains rapidly. Most of the small clips had thousands of views, 30 and 50 thousand on the better ones.

After two days of doing this things went south. The videos got taken down. DMCA. Initially I thought it would be Fox Cricket or CA annoyed I was taking views from them. Fair enough if they didn’t want me doing it then so be it, but it was actually Sony Pictures Networks India  Pvt. Ltd. that issued the take down.

The person behind the DMCA take down was a research analysis, meaning part of their job would be to find usage of copyrighted content.

It turns out one of my tweets was used on Yahoo India and others were used in various Indian websites such as india.com and Indian cricket websites.

The tweets got excellent exposure and their view counts climbed, it’s a weird feeling to see my branding in twitter username and avatar sitting on a large website.

Would the tweets have been DMCA’d had they not been used on Indian websites? I do doubt they would have been. Judging by the DMCA email and the articles post time they were related.

Sometimes getting too much exposure is a bad thing and in this case it was with unauthorized content.