If you're like me, a good Let's Play video blends well with a morning cup of coffee (I usually prefer Kikoskia. The LP'er, I mean). Lately though, and I haven't seen it happen to the (five) channels I've subscribed to, someone has apparently been flagging videos as infringing on a copyright, with intent to abuse YouTube's "Three Strikes" system and get their "targets" banned. At first I thought it was the "Retsupurae" guys taking it a step too far, you know, cause they started Retsupurae in "retaliation" for "thousands of copycats dragging their brainchild (the user SlowBeef allegedly being the first LP'er ever) through the mud" or some such nonsense. But then I heard about this CONJ0PI guy and theawesometoby, and I seem to remember something like this happening a few years ago with a group of morons called The Yahweh Clan.
Technically, and this is splitting hairs by the micron (yes, micron is unofficially a real unit of measurement, of which the average human hair is one hundred) , they can get away with DMCA flagging video game and computer game videos because part of almost all EULA's is the clause about unlawful transmission of the product. But the other side of that coin is that, since the LP'ers aren't getting any money from it, it's just like if we'd gone over to their houses and watched them play it while sitting on their couches.

Blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah stuff about Let's Play videos blah blah blah blah DMCA
Oooh!
Anyway, if I remember correctly, the way the DMCA works is that to cite the DMCA and force a takedown/takedown notice if you're a copyright owner, you don't need proof, so you can simply hide behind the DMCA and complain away. And YouTube, after many lawsuits including a billion-dollar suit with Viacom (which was thrown out, by the way), they choose to err on the side of caution and simply heed toe complaints and take anything down. Will it change? Probably not.

The copyright holders are the ones required to file DMCA takedowns. The owners of the videos can go through the dispute process (which is a pain, yes) and get their video online. These Youtube takedown/flagging things aren't legal actions, just something Google was nice enough to do to stay out of trouble.

Checked "Retsupurae's channel , and found their videos annoying .

DMCAs can also be filed by a third party which has been authorised to do so by the copyright holder.

I will be watching this with great interest, because I want to become one myself, and I want to see if YouTube actually does the right thing (gasp!) and decides that flagging videos is too ripe for being gamed by people who want their targets taken down.
Heck, I'll even shoot them a tweet to tell them that, because I feel pretty strongly about this.
BJ

I had also hoped to start doing LPs of freeware games (thus avoiding most of the red tape that comes with broadcasting footage of commercial games) as an alternative to spending $5000 on a professionally recorded VO demo tape.
My primary question is "Why now?". Why wait until the Let's Play "profession", for lack of better terminology, has reached full fledged community status to start trying to take them down? I mean, there are Let's Play forums, fansites, etc. It's like waiting for the bear to grow up before picking a fist-fight with it.

I still really don't see the attraction of Let's Play videos. They make me want to play the game myself and most of the time I just want to see a gameplay video with no commentary, so I can get a rough idea of what the game is like.

a (good) LP is like the videogame version of Mystery Science Theater 3000. People often read/watch it for the entertainment value of the commentary, even if they (1) already played the game to death, or (2) never played the game and are not interested to play it.
For example, this Animal Crossing LP is, IMO, still the best LP ever, as the author put an incredible horror/thriller spin on an otherwise innocent, lighthearted game. Much more awesome since the author only used screenshots (plus fan arts!) for his LP, not videos.

I agree. As long as the commentary is interesting or amusing enough, I can sit through even the longest of LP's, even if I have already played the games before.

Would you believe that back in the KTMA days of MST3K, the station got several calls complaining about "those guys talking during the movie"? They just didn't get it.

Being a watcher, and not a creator of YouTube LP's I find that the tagging of videos is annoying. Seems too open to be exploited by trolls should Youtube/Google decide they dont have the time or money to put in researching fully what the problem is.
I am unclear of what the copyright ramifications are, though I guess the copyright holder of the game may ask for their removal as per above.. (I'm not a lawyer, legalese makes my brain hurt...), but the copyright holders ought to know, there have been several occassions in which I have purchased games based on watching an LP, so they do in fact, act as advertising. I actually bought Arcanum here on GOG purely because I read an LP of it.
As a long time fan and follower of LP's in general, originally, they were mostly screenshot and text affairs, many of which are on lparchive.org, and not videos at all, until internet connections, HD streaming and capture devices became easily affordable.
However, one video LP that really stands out for it's commentary, is this Trespasser LP [url=]http://lparchive.org/LetsPlay/Trespasser[/url]/ done by Research Indicates. The game itself is a rather bad game, but the commentary makes up for it.