This news may come as a relief to some frequent YouTube viewers. Rebecca Black, the 13-year-old artist of the song “Friday,” has taken the hit song off of the video sharing website.
The video for “Friday” is no longer available on YouTube. According to the Huffington Post, the music video is being put behind a paywall, and now viewers are going to be asked to pay $2.99 to access the video, due to a copyright claim made by Rebecca Black.
YouTube made a statement to TechCrunch on the subject: “YouTube takes copyright infringement very seriously. When we receive a complaint alleging that a video infringes another person or company’s copyrights, we remove that video. Users who believe that a video was removed in error can appeal the copyright takedown.”
Although Black received some negative feedback for the video, the song was performed on an episode of “Glee” and Katy Perry sang the song during a concert earlier this year. “Glee” creator, Ryan Murphy, said that he put the song on the show because it displayed pop culture, and it does not matter if it is loved or hated by the public.
“Friday” was uploaded on YouTube on February 10th, 2011, and it had over a thousand views within its first month of the upload. Up until yesterday, it had over 160 million views. The song was released to iTunes after its debut on YouTube.
As of June 14th, the music video had more than three million “dislikes” on YouTube, which outweighed the 451,000 “likes”. In February, it got to the point where Black was receiving death threats via phone calls and emails, which are still being investigated by the Anaheim Police Department.
