Speedrunning, for those of you who don’t know, is a type of video game competition where people try to run through a video game speedily (hence the name). If you’re only casually familiar with games, a well-done speedrun can be awesome and/or mind-bending to behold.

At the moment, the record for beating Super Mario Bros. without using warp zones is held by a guy named Kosmic. You can watch it here. And because he set a world record, he was featured by the Guinness World Records people on their own YouTube channel.

I bet you already know where this is going:

Uhh, anyone else just have @GWR claim their Super Mario Bros. Videos? I’ve had random no view videos claimed by people before, but you don’t get to claim all my videos including my 4:55. Time to get serious about this

— Kosmic (@Kosmicd12) May 24, 2020

So the Jim Pattison Group (current owners of Guinness World Records, which has been sold a few times), claimed to own the world record they were allegedly celebrating. That’s kind of an error —

Wait, “all”?

got 40 content claims in the same minute, how’s your day going

— Kosmic (@Kosmicd12) May 24, 2020

What.

And yes, other speedrunners did have their videos claimed. Karl Jobst found lots of them and offered an explanation as to why:

Given that speedruns of Super Mario Bros. are so optimized, the majority of footage from different speedruns is going to be the same.

Well, that explains why the famously stupid ContentID bot thought all those different speedrunners were copies of each other. It doesn’t explain why some fool at the Jim Pattison Group shoveled Kosmic’s footage into the ContentID system. As Jobst also pointed out, Guinness barely even bothered to edit Kosmic’s submitted video; how could they think it was their intellectual property?

The obvious but cynical answer is that the Jim Pattison Group is a multi-billion-dollar conglomerate, and they reflexively think things are their property.

(It also doesn’t explain why Guinness’ video from August of last year is only triggering ContentID claims now. Rock Paper Shotgun blandly suggests “human error.”)

Via Techdirt.