On January 22, 2017, the Human Factor television company in the Netherlands created a parody video titled “The Netherlands welcomes Trump in his own words”. It went viral and within a few days it had one million views. We just so happened to stumble on this viral video and to our surprise we found our drone footage in the material. Of course imitation is the best form of flattery but it is also stealing in the digital world without permission. The sad part is they altered the video to remove not just one but two of our logos in the footage.
Here is the information we provided to YouTube:
We attempted to contact Human Factor through their website contact form and no reply. In this email we simply asked for a link back to our website for our work and there was no reply. So we reported to YouTube (Google) the copyright infringement. It took two attempts to get our point across but they did eventually take the video offline. Human Factor contacted us to challenge our claim but they knew they were wrong and offered to pay for the footage. We immediately sent them an invoice for fair pay of the footage, nothing outrageous although I was tempted, and they paid immediately.
Be Social Education creates allot of great organic and original content, photos and videos. We simply ask that if you are interested in our material please contact us.