A recent episode of Family Guy, NES basketball classic Double Dribble, and the takedown of a seven-year-old YouTube vid. We’ve got all the makings of a great story here.
In a Family Guy episode called “Run, Chris, Run” we see Peter and his pal Cleveland sit down to enjoy the NES classic, complete with footage of the infamous corner glitch – an exploit that always lets the player score a three pointer from the corner without fail.
The footage of Double Dribble used in the Family Guy clip is actually taken from a seven-year-old YouTube video from user Sw1tched.
As a result of this, Sw1tched’s original video ended up being removed from YouTube by Fox on copyright grounds, after the episode of Family Guy had aired. Seems like a dick move, right?
Check out the Family Guy clip and the original Double Dribble footage below.
The video is now back up though, which means it’s probably likely that it wasn’t taken down by Fox on purpose,and was instead removed as a result of YouTube’s Content ID, an automated system which identifies similar content and flags it for infringement.
However, Sw1tched recently acknowledged the takedown via an update on YouTube, and revealed that Fox never got in touch to ask for permission to use his footage.
He wrote:
This footage of my playing was used in an episode of Family Guy that aired on Sunday May 14, 2016 without my knowledge or consent. I was subsequently hit with a copyright claim and the video was taken down by YouTube’s Content ID system. After a few days the story broke across the internet and the video was restored on May 20th, 2016 without any of my doing thanks to Fox.
All in all then, a happy ending. Now Double Dribble can fade back in relative obscurity, and Family Guy can carry on doing… whatever it is that show does these days.
Ewan Moore is a journalist at UNILAD Gaming who still quite hasn’t gotten out of his mid 00’s emo phase. After graduating from the University of Portsmouth in 2015 with a BA in Journalism & Media Studies (thanks for asking), he went on to do some freelance words for various places, including Kotaku, Den of Geek, and TheSixthAxis, before landing a full time gig at UNILAD in 2016.