YouTube and that horrific Eduardo tackle

Not only did I watch Arsenal drop two points to Man United on Saturday but I also bore witness to a horrific tackle on Arsenal striker Eduardo which saw him fracture his left fibula as well as sustain an open dislocation of his ankle joint in the same leg. During the match Sky Sports refused to show the replay of the tackle claiming it was too gruesome to repeat.

Now I don’t know about you but I hate being censored so, on Sunday afternoon, lazing about at my parents home, I opened the YouTube application on my iPhone and did a search for eduardo tackle to see if someone had posted a video of the full footage.

Amazingly there were well over 100 results and I started to watch some of the gruesome footage uploaded by YouTube users… it was very upsetting.

Over a coffee discussion yesterday I told Gregor to do a similar search on YouTube to watch the unedited video but when he tried to click a video, any video, all he got was a message saying “This video is no longer available due to a copyright claim by Arsenal Football Club”.

Back in August last year we went through a process, well Gregor did, whereby The Times had a copyright infringement case and it was very interesting to see YouTube’s take on all of this.

It took YouTube about three days to remove the video in question but we were also invited to use their Content Verification Tool which allows content owners to request removal of infringing content by using check boxes and “select all” functions. A very simple interface and a seemingly immediate solution to copyright infringement.

I was just fascinated how quickly these videos of the Eduardo tackle disappeared from YouTube and it would appear that this self-managed solution is really helping all content owners combat the issue of plagiarism. It is clearly a much more efficient way of handling these types of issues than having YouTube moderate everything through a three-day lengthy process.

If you are interested in viewing images of the tackle in question I have uploaded them here and here and if you want to see the live TV footage I have a short video clip of the tackle here. I must warn you it’s not pretty which is why I haven’t embedded it into this post.