THE BBC have dropped their complaint about the YouTube channel of independence campaigner Peter Curran.
Curran, who tweets under the name @moridura, had his account on the video sharing site suspended last week.
Over the course of many years he had collected and posted clips from the BBC’s news and current affairs output. His channel was home to thousands of videos, mostly related to Scottish independence and Scottish politics.
READ MORE: This is what an independent Scotland can learn from the Wings/BBC copyright row
But last week the BBC’s lawyers complained to YouTube about both Curran and pro-independence blogger, Wings Over Scotland.
The row caused outrage with former First Minister Alex Salmond writing to the Director General of the BBC asking him to intervene.
Last Thursday morning, on BBC Radio Scotland’s John Beattie show, Ian Small the head of public policy for BBC Scotland, announced that they would no longer be pursuing the complaint against Wings Over Scotland’s editor, Stuart Campbell.
He told the host: “We've been speaking to the BBC colleagues in BBC legal in London over the last few days and a letter is going out this very afternoon to Mr Campbell to indicate that the BBC is undertaking a review of all of its work in the area relative to particular videos which political content.”
But while Campbell’s channel was back up and running, Curran’s remained suspended.
In a further letter to BBC management today, Salmond called on the bosses to ditch their complaint against Curran.
In a statement, a BBC spokesman told The National: “We’ve withdrawn our complaint about the use of content on this site pending our review, and we note that YouTube has now restored the site.
“As we said last week, we act entirely irrespective of the political views of the infringing YouTube channels and have taken action against the use of our material by individuals or organisations from across the political spectrum.
READ MORE: BBC backs down in Wings YouTube row and blames Labour councillor
“When notified about material, our policy has been to report infringing content through YouTube’s own takedown procedure without contacting the owner of the relevant YouTube account.
“An exception we make to this rule is where the YouTube accounts are owned by elected politicians or are official accounts of political parties. However, we will now be reviewing our practice in relation to ‘political’ content to ensure our policy remains appropriate for today’s social media environment.”
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