The Alabama NCAA football team saw its Twitter account temporarily suspended this week.
The team’s Twitter account was up and running just fine on Wednesday, but suddenly was taken offline about 12 hours after its last post. While the Twitter account didn’t say why the page was taken offline, USA Today, which earlier reported on the takedown and investigated its cause, said that the account might have violated the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA).
The DMCA is a broad regulation that aims at protecting copyrights on the Internet. While the DMCA is often violated via piracy, or people downloading copyrighted content illegally, it can also be violated if content is taken without permission and used for advertising or other activities.
According to USA Today, the Alabama Twitter account posted something that must have infringed the DMCA on June 27. It wasn’t discovered until this week. Since DMCA violations run afoul of Twitter’s rules, the site temporarily suspended the account. Twitter routinely suspends accounts for certain periods of time whenever they violate certain site rules. Not violating the DMCA is one of those rules.
As of this writing, the Alabama Twitter account is back up and running. There hasn’t yet been a mention on the page on why it was taken down.