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UGA Football Twitter account taken to 'Twitter jail' after sixth violation

Here's the most recent Tweet that has the football team's Twitter account in trouble.
Photo: Twitter.com/@FootballUGA

UGA is in Twitter jail. Again.

The University of Georgia football team's Twitter account, @FootballUGA, was suspended on Saturday before the spring game, known as G-Day.

People associated with the team were aware that the account was suspended on Saturday, but claimed not to know why.

Lumen, a third party research project that studies cease and desist letters, has a database that records Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) takedown notices. The database shows that the account has received six different takedown notices, all of them from private senders except for a complaint from Recording Industry Association of America, Inc. in January of 2017.

The most recent complaint was from April 19, 2018. The complaint included dozens of Tweets, including one against LSU's softball account. A cache of the website provided by Google showed that the Tweet that received the takedown notice was from March 23, 2018. The Tweet was a video from Pro Day.

Photo: Twitter.com/@FootballUGA

UGA Athletics did not respond to 11Alive's request for comment over the alleged repeated violations of the DMCA.

Twitter Support denied comment, saying it could not comment on specific accounts. However, it did provide its policy on DMCA and copyright infringement on Twitter.

Twitter Rules state that repeat offenders of DMCA may have their account suspended and in more serious cases, permanently terminated.

Georgia Athletics produces its own video, but there have been instances where they use popular music in the video. Twitter supports fair use, according to its policy, except in instances where the copyrighted material is being used for commercial purposes in addition to other factors.

This is not the first time the account has been suspended. It was suspended on National Signing Day for what appears to be similar reasons, according to a complaint on February 7. Other complaints against UGA in 2017 came on January 17, June 20, July 27 and August 14.

It is unknown how long the account will be suspended or if they will appeal the violation.

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