Congress gets videos mocking Rahul Gandhi off pro-Modi channel

NEW DELHI: Two videos mocking Rahul Gandhi were taken down from a pro-Modi YouTube channel after the Congress served it with copyright violation notice. The channel, “I Support Narendra Modi,” had posted two short clips from Congress president Rahul Gandhi’s public interaction at a Singapore university last month, with added commentary in overlaid text making fun of the Congress president. Reacting to the move, the BJP accused the Congress of stifling criticism. Congress said it was a matter of usage permission.

“The Congress is harming smaller channels in this way,” says Vikas Pandey, who runs the channel which has 1.1 lakh subscribers. A Twitter handle associated with his channel, @iSupportNamo tweeted, “This act by CONGRESS PARTY @INCIndia and @RahulGandhi proves that they are against FREEDOM OF SPEECH.” He was among the 150 BJP IT Cell members and volunteers who were invited for a discussion with Prime Minister Narendra Modi in July 2015.

The Congress said that this wasn’t an issue of stifling criticism, and pointed to other thriving online videos mocking and making fun of Gandhi on YouTube, saying they have no issue with those. “The Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy shot the video and owns it. We had their permission to use it on our channel. This is just an issue of usage permissions and copyright,” said Congress’ head of social media and digital communications Divya Spandana, talking about the takedown on Pandey’s channel. “There are so many other such videos on YouTube, like that of Shyam Rangeela where he mimics Rahul Gandhi,” she added.

On YouTube, video reuse and copyright claims are determined by the kind of “license” a creator marks their work with. This is mentioned in the video description. Videos marked with YouTube’s “Creative Commons Attribution license (reuse allowed)” can be reshared and reused on other YouTube channels while the copyright rests with the original uploader. That is not the case with the “Standard YouTube License,” under which the Singapore videos were uploaded. Here, other channels reposting or reusing the video on YouTube is counted as a copyright infringement.

On Wednesday, Pandey received a YouTube notice over email. This was for a video titled, “Pappu Rahul Gandhi Gets Confused While Talking About Singapore,” and named Indian National Congress as the party that issued the takedown. This was the second such notice or “copyright strike” that he had received. The first was for a similar video from the same event titled, “Mil Gaya Rahul Gandhi Ke Pappu Hone Ka Saboot – Singapore video Question and Answer session.” This had Gandhi talking of healthcare and MRI machines. Pandey shared the YouTube emails with TOI. “Due to a copyright takedown notice that we received, we had to take down your video from YouTube,” read both the mails, before detailing other specifics.

Three strikes lead to a channel being disabled. “The two copyright strikes came within a day of each other,” says Pandey who claims to have been associated with the BJP for over a decade. He says he runs Facebook pages worth “two-three crore likes.” Two other longer videos of Rahul Gandhi’s public interaction in Singapore are available on YouTube. One was posted on Rahul Gandhi’s own verified YouTube channel on March 8, while the other was posted on the channel of Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy on March 12.

(Note: An edited version of this story appeared in the print edition of the Times of India on April 13, 2018)