Hello all, This is my first post here but I've been lurking on this board and using the mods for over 6 years. Anyways, I wanted to raise a discussion and talk about some trends I've been seeing going on, here on this forum specifically, as an incident relative to the primary topic was perpetrated by a member of this modding community. Right now, the business models of the old Media corporations are dying. It's a well documented fact that print news is out, and that even subscription sites like the Wall Street Journal are struggling and still rely on ad revenue. The viewership, or market share or however you want to label the consumer-base for this type of content have been increasingly going to other sources such as smaller news organizations, bloggers, news aggregator websites such as reddit or youtube personalities such as Phillip DeFranco. This is a direct threat against the old Media and to combat this, they have been doing very disingenuous "hit" pieces on high-subscriber base Youtube personalities. I'm sure everyone here is aware of the completely hyperbole and fictitious claims that WSJ made against Youtuber PewDiePie, where WSJ created a video with Hitler, Nazi Flags and marching Nazi troops as background for quoting PewDiePie out of context all while playing Nazi music to try and force a connection between the out-of-context material and the claim that PewDiePie is anti-semitic. Now the Daily Mail is claiming that Joerg Sprave's Slingshot Channel is being attacked. This time under the claim that Terrorist use Jeorg Sprave's videos (on slingshots) as a training manual. Specifically focusing on one video in which he reviews a commercially available product that claims to be a stab-proof vest. No actual factual support is presented to substantiate the claim that terrorist are in fact using the video as a training manual, but despite this lack of evidence, the damage has bee done. In the case of PewDiePie, the damage was that he lost his Disney contract to produce content, as well as some contracts with Google. A substantial amount of money. In the case of Jeorg Spave, he now has one "strike" against his channel for "community guideline violations" under the claim that a review of a safety products failure to live up to it's claims violates the "harmful and dangerous content" guidelines. If he receives two more strikes, he permanently loses his channel, and the ewprimary source of income. Which brings me to the incident perpetrated by a member of this modding community. Youtube content creators currently live under a "three strikes" Sword of Damocles fear. Not only are the Youtube Guide Lines completely ambiguous and subjective, (under the guideline for harmful and dangerous content, the Nottingham University Chemistry Channel "Periodic Videos" should be banned as they clearly demonstrate how to make explosives on their channel) they are also rife with abuse. The primary source of which is false Copyright Claims. Unlike actual law, and the letter of the law that Youtube cites (the DMCA), Youtube operates under a "guilty until proven innocent" ideology (despite the DMCA allowing for verification and substantiation before action) as that is the easiest and safest way (for them) to handle the matter. However that means that if you are a content creator, and someone makes a Copyright Claim against you, you get one Strike against your account and you must now fight to prove your innocence. Instead of the claimant having to prove their argument the burden of proof is shifted to the defendant. And this is fine and all for people who genuinely do violate copyright law, but it has become more and more of a tool to shutdown opposition, or to force people to do what you want (the three strikes system has been used to blackmail content producers). As regardless of whether your copyright claim is legit or not, Youtube will act as if it is until the defendant can prove otherwise. Which brings me to this video in which popular Youtuber Nexus Mod Reviewer MXR had one of his videos taken down under a false copyright claim and is now suffering one strike. The actual cause for the false copyright claim being the claimant wanting to "defend" the "other" mod creators content that she bundled with her own. That's right, this person also filed copyright claim on mods that they self admit they do not have claim to. Despite the facts that: 1.) There is this thing called "fair use" and doing a review/evaluation of something falls under this purview. 2.) Mod creators technically don't own the Skyrim Mods they create, these are in fact all property of Bethesda Softworks, and that it is they who have the legitimate copyright claim (if any). This person did not even privately contact MXR asking for him to remove the video, instead they just failed the blatantly false copyright claim. In addition to this, they have also disabled all commenting on their mods as well as disabled private messaging, making it impossible for any legitimate resolution or recourse to be had.d I'm sure that this person was receiving quite a bit of anger for their actions, but I find such actions, making a false copyright claims then disabling all means of feedback to be equally as despicable and justification for the anger they are receiving. In closing, I'm tired of selfish, disingenuous, liars and criminals abusing Youtube's policies to damage the various internet communities and other people for no reason other than their own selfishness and greed. I believe this is an emerging topic we need to openly discuss and action needs to be taken within each community to curtail such abuses.
