Gustavo Gomez. Suspended for videos with music in the background.

In February 2021, Gustavo Gómez, director of Caracol Radio's 6AM Hoy por Hoy program, received a Twitter message announcing that his account, with more than 500,000 followers, had been suspended for non-compliance with copyright rules.

As Gómez explained at the time, in an editorial highly critical of Twitter titled 'Abusive little bird', the sanctioned post alluded to a video published on his account in 2018 -that is, more than two years earlier-. There appear colleagues of his from the radio program La Luciérnaga and, in the background, the song that gave rise to the infraction is played.

The complaint, filed by the International Federation of Phonographic Industries, an organization representing the interests of record labels, included a series of links to tweets with other allegedly infringing material. Apparently, they were not all Gomez's tweets, but messages he had retweeted. According to the notice sent by Twitter, those tweets violated the copyright of the same Marc Anthony song owned by Sony Music.

A few days later, Gómez recovered his account. Apparently, the journalist had initiated the formal process and simultaneously the station's digital team contacted Twitter representatives. However, six months later the account was suspended again for the same reasons. This time the trigger was a video that Gómez had recorded to denounce the noise pollution of someone who had loud music playing in the street. 

Under U.S. online copyright law (the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, DMCA), platforms must go through a notice-and-takedown process when their users make unauthorized use of third-party material. Under this mechanism, a copyright claim obliges the platform to take down the content and inform the user that he or she has the possibility to file an appeal to have the publication reinstated (known as counter-notification). The latter option, however, is not easy for users to understand and process.

In the videos disclosed by the journalist through Twitter, the inclusion of the music was incidental, so its use could be protected by fair use grounds and could have given rise to a counter-notification. In any case, the new complaint received by Gómez, added to the previous ones, led to the accumulation of several copyright infringements which, not having been answered in the terms provided by the platform, led to the suspension. As of today, the account of journalist Gustavo Gómez remains suspended.

On December 7, 2021, after five months without access to his account, the journalist received an email from Twitter with a copy of the copyright claims he had to resolve. According to the company, after reviewing the infringements, it had decided to reinstate the account. That same day, Gómez expressed his annoyance with the way Twitter had acted, suggesting that behind his sanction there could be motives other than copyright. "Or, at the very least, a clumsiness in the use of filtering mechanisms and technological protection. An outrage, in short."