A documentary examining what its makers call the theological decline of the Episcopal Church was removed from YouTube earlier this month after a copyright complaint — over roughly 17 seconds of footage showing a pastor's own public remarks.

On October 6, the Church Reform Initiative (CRI) released All Are Not Welcome: The Downfall of the Episcopal Church and How to Reform Her, a film featuring interviews with Anglican and Episcopal figures. The documentary quickly drew around 40,000 views, according to reporting by Protestia. Then St. Michael and All Angels Episcopal Church in Albuquerque, New Mexico, filed a copyright complaint over a brief clip of Rev. Mike Angell discussing the Episcopal Church's accommodation of homosexuality.

According to Protestia, YouTube gave CRI seven days to remove the film or face a copyright strike and forced removal. CRI told YouTube support that the short excerpt — Angell's own publicly available statements used as evidence for the documentary's criticism — was protected under federal fair use law, and asked the company to examine the circumstances before acting. YouTube declined, informing CRI that no preemptive appeal was available: delete the video, persuade the church to withdraw the complaint, or let the takedown proceed and file a counter-notification afterward.

Faced with losing the documentary, CRI pulled the original and uploaded an edited version without the disputed footage. Protestia notes that this is largely how the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), passed in 1998, is designed to work: under the law, platforms like YouTube and X receive substantial protection from copyright liability when they comply with legally sufficient removal requests, and they are not required to adjudicate fair-use disputes before acting.

Once a video is removed, a creator can file a formal counter-notification — but Protestia reports that YouTube will not accept it until after the video has been taken down and the strike applied. If the claimant does not report a qualifying lawsuit within 10 days, the content is generally restored within 10 to 14 business days. In the attention economy of the internet, that is an eternity: as Protestia puts it, the complaint itself becomes the punishment, even when the claimant never has to prove infringement before a judge.

Fair use, the outlet argues, is not an obscure loophole. Under 17 U.S.C. § 107, copyright law explicitly protects uses such as criticism, commentary, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, and research — and a documentary quoting a short excerpt of someone's public statements in order to criticize those very statements is one of the clearest reasons the doctrine exists. Protestia also notes that under the Ninth Circuit's Lenz v. Universal ruling, copyright holders must consider fair use before filing a DMCA takedown notice, and that knowingly misrepresenting infringement can create liability.

The CRI episode is not an isolated one, according to Protestia. Earlier this year, the outlet says, journalist Julie Roys used YouTube's copyright system to have police body-camera footage removed from a Protestia article — footage Roys had obtained through a public-records request and published in connection with reporting on her own site. Protestia says that when it uploaded the same footage with Roys' watermark and source identification intact, her channel filed a copyright complaint and YouTube removed Protestia's copy. According to Protestia, when its editor asked Roys to retract the complaint, she replied that she did not want anything with her branding on his site — a preference, he argues, that confers no copyright interest in publicly owned footage.

A more recent example cited by Protestia involves Charles Huckaby, pastor of Ramah Baptist Church, who the outlet says submitted a DMCA complaint against a social media post containing a single screenshot from the church's own publicly available 78-minute worship livestream. The post, according to Protestia, paired the screenshot with commentary criticizing theologian Scott Aniol. The outlet argues that a single frame of a public church service used as documentary evidence for commentary is textbook fair use — and notes that the DMCA process required Huckaby to identify himself and sign a good-faith representation that the use was unauthorized.

None of these complaints have been adjudicated by a court as wrongful infringement claims, and the churches and individuals involved may sincerely believe their rights were violated. But Protestia's central charge is a moral one aimed squarely at Christians: submitting a legal accusation you know — or should know — to be baseless, in order to bury criticism, is a form of false witness. "Copyright law," the outlet concludes, "doesn't exist to ensure your branding only appears alongside people you approve of."