YouTube Kills End The Fed Audio. Is the real reason political censorship?

I'll try to keep this as to-the-point as I can, but I have to get into some detail, so it's going to be fairly long. Please do not comment until you read the whole post and the article at the end.

I filmed the Pittsburgh End The Fed protest on 11-22-08. I edited the footage into an 8 minute and 23 second video and uploaded it to YouTube on 11-24-08. Most people from around the country were eager to share their footage after the protests, so they released raw or quickly-edited videos. Since I took a little extra time it was (arguably) one of the better-produced End The Fed videos made.

I went to watch the video today and I get a notice saying "Your video, Pittsburgh "End The Fed" Protest (11-22-2008), may have audio content from Press Play by Stone Temple Pilots that is owned or licensed by WMG." YouTube has now completely removed the audio from the entire video, which included interviews with protesters (one of which was 2008 Green Party Congressional Candidate Titus North), bull-horning, and anti-Fed chants.

I did use approximately 45 seconds of this song at the very end of the video, from about 7:38 - 8:23. However, what I want to know is why and how this specific video was flagged in this way.

Anyone who is familiar with YouTube knows there are countless videos-- likely numbering in the millions or even tens of millions-- that use copyrighted music. Tons of them have been up much longer than my video, are much more popular, and more prominently feature (less obscure) copyrighted music. They have not had their audio removed. (My video does include links to a few websites that I like, most of which I am not affiliated with and none of which I make any money off of; So do many of these other millions of videos.)

Additionally, if you search for Stone Temple Pilots today you will get over 10,000 hits, many of them using copyrighted songs from the albums (played in full, not an excerpt). These videos, which are easily searchable by someone who is looking for copyrighted STP music, have not had their audio removed, yet mine-- which will not come up if you search for STP, WMG, or anything like that-- has. Why?

A few other facts:

* "Just Press Play", the song I used, is an instrumental, so someone could not watch the video, search for some lyrics, and figure out what the song was that way. It had to be identified by someone who recognized it just from the instrumental.

* The video has only gotten roughly a few dozen views in the past month. Of its 993 views, the vast majority came within the first week of my posting it. YouTube's insight page for that video shows a spike one day this month where it got roughly 12-13 views. The second highest day it got six. Every other day got zero to three views (and many were zero). Presumably most of these people are anti-Fed

* Almost half of the views the video has are from YouTube searches for these phrases: pittsburgh end the fed, end the fed pittsburgh, silver nwo, freedom to fascism pl, america freedom to fascism pl, protest federal reserve, abolish the fed protest, tax-5, protests against cartels, end the fed protest- pittsburgh". Almost all of the rest came from external links or embedded videos from anti-Fed sites.

So, there's really only a few scenarios here as far as I can see. Which seems most likely to you?

1. Someone is payed to scour YouTube for videos that use music that is copyrighted by WMG. This person completely missed all of the videos that come up when you search for Stone Temple Pilots, but they somehow happened to be one of only a few dozen people to come across my video in the past month. They then watched it the whole way through and recognized the 45 second instrumental at the end which happened to be a WMG song.

2. One of the other few dozen people who clicked on the video in the past month watched it the whole way through, recognized the instrumental at the very end, and felt compelled to alert WMG and/or YouTube that I was using copyrighted material so that it would get pulled, and followed through on this inclination.

3. YouTube is targeting videos with "dissident" commentary on certain specific political topics. Many of the better-produced ones use music, and much of this music is copyrighted. Therefore if they can just identify at least one copyrighted song specifically they have a convenient excuse to pull many of them (or cut the audio and render it ineffective at communicating its message) and claim it was simply due to copyright infringement and had nothing to do with the rest of the content -- even as millions of much older and much more popular videos which use copyrighted music in a much more blatant way are kept in tact, including thousands using music from the same label/artist. My video was targeted in this way.

4. Someone other than YouTube or WMG is targeting videos like mine in a similar manner as outlined in #3 and then reporting the "copyright infringement" to WMG, who then reports it to YouTube. (In this scenario WMG and YouTube would be neutral and only responding to these complaints by the this unknown, politically-motivated third party.)

Please read this article from a week ago, "YouTube Expands 9/11 Truth Purge" before commenting:
http://www.prisonplanet.com/you-tube-expands-911-truth-purge.html

Thanks for your input.

(The now-muted video in question can be found here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rz-8eSNNP0U)