There’s a glorious irony in the fact that social media companies like YouTube are impossible to contact. After all the reason they exist is to enhance communication, but not, it seems, if you are the one trying to contact them.

Try and find a telephone number for the likes of YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Google and the rest of the behemoths that control the internet. There isn’t one. They all have huge offices in prime sites across London where, I assume, thousands of people spend their days beavering away making our online experience even better. But just try contacting them. Those thousands of people don’t want the likes of you and me, the users of their platforms, actually speaking to them. Oh no, that would be too much.

The latest company who don’t want me to contact them is YouTube. I have a YouTube channel. Admittedly it doesn’t attract millions of avid viewers but hey we’ve all got to start somewhere. I’ve tried to upload a video of some of my songs and immediately YouTube blocked it because of a copyright claim.

After a lot of messing about I finally managed to show YouTube that I own the copyright to my own songs and they sent me the following email:

Hi Sean Kearns,

Good news! After reviewing your dispute, CD Baby has decided to release their copyright claim on your YouTube video.

Video title: “Present Tense”

– The YouTube Team

Except it isn’t good news because the goblins at YouTube still won’t let me post the video because, and wait for it, there is a copyright claim.

In other words I could spend what is left of my life going round in circles asking YouTube to let the world see my video and them refusing. It could be sorted in seconds by a human being on the end of a phone but, as pointed out above, that ain’t going to happen.

Thanks a bunch YouTube. I hope you’re all enjoying the splendid offices, salaries and perks, maybe once in while you could think of us, the creators and users of your platform and actually make it easy, not difficult. Then again maybe one day pigs will fly.

 

 

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