Last week we told you about how Viacom was sending fraudulent ownership claims to indie filmmakers on YouTube. A few days after our post went up about how they were doing this to animator Joanna Davidovich, a Viacom executive got in touch with her to explain what happened.

Here’s Joanna:

I was personally contacted by an executive at Viacom, who explained how my film got mixed into their system. Juxtaposer was in a film festival that was presented by Nicktoons, which is of course a Viacom company. They offered selections of the festival as downloadable content, and Juxtaposer was one of them. They just forgot that Viacom’s rights to those films were all nonexclusive. He personally assured me that Viacom is no longer making a claim to my film and YouTube should be sending me documents affirming that shortly.

I don’t think this would have been over with nearly as fast if not for the publicity I got from your post. This could have been a nightmare, but it wasn’t. Count this one a success!

Score one for the little guy.

Viacom Apologizes! [Channel Federator Raw]
PREVIOUSLY: Viacom Fraudulently Claims Ownership Of Indie Filmmakers’ YouTube Clips

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