If you’re on YouTube a lot, you’ve probably come across a thumbnail of an animated girl studying at her desk next to a window.
To her loyal fans, this girl is known simply as ‘Lofi Girl’, as she is the face of a livestream that plays lo-fi music 24/7.
Titled ‘lofi hip hop radio – beats to relax/study to’, the removal of the livestream recently sent shockwaves around the world.
A record label had apparently filed a copyright claim, but it turned out to be false. YouTube has terminated the company’s account instead.
The public first caught wind of the copyright strike on Sunday (10 Jul) via a tweet from the official Lofi Girl account.
In it, Lofi Girl posted a message from YouTube that stated they had removed their livestream due to a copyright takedown notice from FMC Music Sdn Bhd Malaysia.
Apart from ‘beats to relax/study to’, the channel’s other livestream titled ‘beats to sleep/chill to‘ was also affected.
At the time of removal, the two had a combined total of 797 million views and over 41,000 hours of streaming time.
Unwilling to go down without a fight, the channel – which has 10.8 million subscribers – filed a counterclaim against FMC Music Sdn Bhd Malaysia.
Lofi Girl also called on their 135,111 Twitter followers to spread the word by kickstarting the hashtag #BringBackLofiGirl.
According to Yahoo! Finance, this prompted YouTube to manually review the record label’s complaint and conclude that it had no ownership over the music being played.
A day later (11 Jul), YouTube confirmed that the copyright infringement report was ‘abusive’ and that they had restored the livestreams.
Source: @TeamYoutube on Twitter
They added that it can sometimes take up to 48 hours for ‘everything to be back to normal’, referring to the reinstatement of the livestreams.
YouTube also revealed that they had terminated the record label’s account.
A check on YouTube, however, shows that the record label’s channel is still up at the time of writing.
When contacted by Malaysiakini, a spokesperson for FMC Music said that hackers had compromised the company’s YouTube account and filed the complaint.
“We have already reported this to Google and we are hoping that this works out in the end,” they stated.
In a statement to The Star, FMC Music also said that it had made a report to YouTube and was awaiting the results of an investigation.
Since the livestreams’ takedown, angry fans have swarmed FMC Music’s social accounts with #BringBackLofiGirl.
Among them are Malaysians, who say the company’s actions have only brought shame to the country.
At the time of reporting, both ‘beats to study/relax to’ and ‘beats to sleep/chill to’ are fully back online.
In light of the earlier takedown, however, Lofi Girl expressed disappointment towards YouTube for not having ‘any kind of protection or manual review of these false claims’.
They claimed that there was a similar incident in 2020 where YouTube had taken down the entire channel.
As such, they hoped the platform would consider making changes to their copyright reporting system.
In doing so, such incidents could be prevented from recurring and would also protect content creators and their work.
As a source of comfort and concentration to so many, Lofi Girl’s livestreams truly play a vital role on YouTube.
We’re glad the main video is streaming again and hope ‘beats to sleep/chill to’ will soon follow suit.
Fingers crossed YouTube’s management will take this as a sign to review their systems and do better by their users.
Have news you must share? Get in touch with us via email at news@mustsharenews.com.
Featured image adapted from Lofi Girl on YouTube.
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