Taking Down the Moon: Mistaken Copyright Strikes Over Moon Videos

With space travel becoming more attainable for individuals, owning a few acres of land on the Earth’s moon may seem like a good investment, even if the commute is a bit long. Unfortunately, ownership of the moon’s real estate is not permitted under the 1967 Outer Space Treaty. However, in a comical instance of automated copyright enforcement, it appears that Universal Music Publishing Group (“UMPG”) briefly attempted to lay claim to 9.3 billion moon acres when it issued a notice of copyright infringement to British filmmaker, Phillip Bloom.

Bloom was on vacation in Greece when he pulled out his camera and filmed a full moon. He posted THIS soundless, 30-second video to his personal Facebook account. Bloom was subsequently notified that his video had been blocked on the platform because UMPG issued a claim of copyright infringement. Bloom disputed the claim and posted details about the block on social media. After the story gained traction among his followers and with online media sources, UMPG dropped its claim and released the video along with several other moon videos posted by other users that it had similarly blocked—at least one of which had been blocked for over three years. In an interview, Bloom complained that it only takes seconds for entities like UMPG to assert a claim of copyright infringement, but that disputing a claim may take a week, during which time his non-infringing content may not be posted or viewed on Facebook.

It is likely that such a “block” took even less time than Bloom estimated, as many entities like Facebook and UMPG utilize artificial intelligence to detect potentially infringing material and issue infringement claims. This is not the first time that UMPG has been accused of overreaching in the realm of copyrights. For example, UMPG tried to lay claim to the song “Yes! We Have No Bananas” after the song entered the public domain in 2019. UMPG was also embroiled in a decade-long legal battle involving a takedown notice it issued over a video of a baby dancing to Prince’s “Let’s Go Crazy,” which the baby’s mother had posted to YouTube. That dispute, Lenz v. Universal Music Corp., set one of the most important copyright law precedents of the internet era, holding that rightsholders have a duty to consider—in good faith and prior to sending a formal takedown notification—whether the conduct constitutes a legitimate copyright infringement.

Some critics point out that the fault may lie with Facebook’s algorithm which has shown tremendous deficits in determining non-infringing uses of copyrighted material like fair use, parody, and satire. Additionally, blocks, like the type experienced by Bloom, often transpire outside of the traditional legal system through a platform’s internal system, which is regulated by the platform itself. Until algorithms improve, entities like UMPG may want to provide additional human supervision to avoid asserting bizarre and celestially odd claims—like copyrighting the moon.