Make YouTube Great Again

Great explanation of Copyright and Fair use by Matthias, in a campaign stared by GradeAUnderA called #MakeYouTubeGreatAgain…given my background of musical mashup piracy and unofficial remix I must be against this creator copyright business, right?

Wrong. I’ve been affected on YouTube by baseless claims, DMCAs from companies that don’t even OWN the things they’re claiming, copyright strikes for obvious fair use or parody/mashups (Rastamouse Sleng Teng? A+D’s Sarah Silverman mashup? #NeverForget) and I’ve contested those claims, even down to *gulp* giving these thieves and weasels my home address in a full-on DMCA counter claim. Did it do anything?

Nope. Your appeal is denied without any real reason and zero transparency, and then you can’t appeal again. BANG! Case closed. Now fuck off. The system is completely fucked unless you’re a major company, as a YouTube creator you’re powerless against these lawyers and copyright bots and wonks.

Was that a reason why I’ve mostly stopped making video mashups, remixes, and the like? One of them, yes. It just gets to be too much hassle, I nearly always fought back, but fighting alone gets tiring after many years.

And React videos? They are the cancer of YouTube. Fuck ’em. And fuck those who steal videos for monetisation, using whole videos is NOT transformation or fair use. None of my work has ever took the whole thing, there always was editing and a new soundtrack, or many other clips, clear creation or transformation, you definitely weren’t watching the same video! You might prefer the original and think my additions were shit, but you could never confuse one of my mashup videos for that – or the few edited parody/soundtrack cutup spoofs I’ve done.

They say they’ll do something, but we’ve heard that before, empty promises. I’m guessing that’ll be like Facebook ‘solving’ the Real Name problem by ignoring it until it goes away. Yeah solved by the NEXT millenium right? I thought so.

So yeah, tweet at @SusanWojcicki that she has a real problem. A REAL problem. Like the Fine Bros found, a lot of creators are not happy with what’s going down on the site, and how they’ve been treated. Vive La Revolution! (original article about this from Rob Dolby)

P.S. Fuck you Wired. I was going to link to a nice article by Nadia Drake until this popped up. I’m not going to shut off my adblocker because you can’t work out how to make money without endangering my computer from malware. And I’m certainly not going to link to a site that might endanger my readers like that, or have restricted content that some of them can’t read.

Bye Wired! Nice knowing you…like Forbes you won’t last long.