Twitter Suspends Deadspin, SBNation After Sharing NFL Videos

Foremost physical activities leagues have had a fraught relationship with social media in relation to sharing are living video, peculiarly clips of games.

Either way, the Deadspin and two SB Nation Twitter accounts were suspended, and the most recent GIFs were removed. All of the tweets included GIFs, and all of the requests were filed by the NFL.

Parker Higgins, director of copyright activism at civil liberties non-profit Electronic Frontier Foundation, says that may be the case.

This video includes images from Getty Images. This year the company cut off API access to Politwoops and other sites that republished politicians’ deleted tweets, in effect ending those sites’ ability to carry out their mission. Twitter has yet to comment on those suspensions. “We take copyright infringement issues seriously and always try to keep our use of unlicensed third-party footage within the bounds of fair use”, the company said in a statement.

Deadspin was restored within a few hours, but SBNationGif remains unavailable as of Tuesday afternoon. Depending on whom you ask, allowing the user-produced videos to survive online is either bad business or good promotion. SB Nation remained offline as of late Monday, the New York Times reported.

The challenge and takedown process is set out in the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). That service is exactly what cost them their right to tweet. And the law specifies that accounts of repeat offenders should be suspended. But leagues and rights-holders are becoming increasingly territorial. The social network told Venturebeat that it doesn’t comment on individual accounts. This has become an area of particular concern with social media sites that rely on or encourage the use of video.

Olbermann – who has more than 548,000 followers – vented his frustration at Twitter, calling the suspension “gratuitous” and “unexplained censorship”.

“We got 18 takedown notices about 16 tweets”. The league also launched a YouTube channel this year.