"Lofi hip hop radio – beats to relax/study to" has 688m views and is among the most popular streams on YouTube—that iconic anime student, studying away, lurks in the sidebars of countless site visitors. But today she is gone, thanks to a takedown demand by a company in Malaysia. (Update: it's back.)
For anyone thinking this situation is absurd, or wrong, or outright illegal, just remember smaller artists have been abused by this system for years now and Youtube has refused to try to fix whats clearly broken. And to be clear, I recognize the importance of copyright law, but Youtube's Content ID system is not upholding the law at this point, its just creating avenues for real scumbags to scam channels out of any hard earned revenue they have.
Note that it appears that the claimant filed a DMCA takedown, not a ContentID claim as assumed here. Either way, it gets to ongoing problems with YouTube's ramshackle copyright enforcement system, which makes it easy to threaten, extort, censor or skim ad revenues from users via fraudulent claims—and to follow through.
