LiveAction Email to YouTube Content Partnership Manager George Strompolos

On Tue, Sep 9, 2008 at 11:17 PM

Dear Mr. Strompolos:

Your email was given to me by a student at UCLA and I am writing you because I understand that you are the Content Management Partner at YouTube.
 
Currently I am dealing with a situation in which, starting in late August, YouTube banned 5 videos from the YouTube channel "liveactionfilms". These videos have received over 160,000 views and have been on the site between 4 and 7 months. These videos were removed with no warning and no reason beyond the ambiguous warning "content inappropriate". These videos do not contain ANY graphic or sexual content and I have actually shown these videos to my mom (so they can be that bad!).
 
Our organization has been trying to get in contact with YouTube for over a week (have have filled out the official YouTube form to contest the removal of our video) to get clarification. Late last week Google CEO Eric Schmidt was asked at the GOP Convention why our videos had
been removed. You can watch the interchange at: http://www.eyeblast.tv/public/video.aspx?RsrcID=35098 Eric Schmidt said that he would "look into it" although we have not received any response.
 
Because of the lack of response from YouTube, we have launched a public media response with grassroots activism at: http://liveactionfilms.org/youtube/.

We would like to call off the attack dogs but we have yet to get YouTube's attention for them to respond to us in responsible, adult fashion.
 
I encourage you to read http://liveactionfilms.org/youtube/ to get up to speed on what is going. Please get back to me at 559-970-3575 as soon as possible.
 
Regards,
 
David R. Schmidt
Media Director, Live Action, Inc.
559-970-3575
davidschmidt@liveactionfilms.org
http://LiveActionFilms.org