Guide to lodging copyright strikes on YouTube

[NoTalentHack]

I'm working on one of these right now, with screenshots and everything. It's still pretty rough, but it's only about 2K words long. Would anyone be interested in taking a look to make sure that the instructions make sense to someone who hasn't been through the process before?

 

[Cagivagurl]

Have you tried messaging the offended directly?

 

[SimonDoom]

2K words seems like a lot.

 

[NoTalentHack]

Have you tried messaging the offended directly?

I have, but unfortunately a number of them basically said, "I would, but I don't know how." I don't really want to beta test on them if it's not clear; I'd like them to be able to jump straight in with confidence. Once it's published, I'll reach out to them again.

 

[NoTalentHack]

2K words seems like a lot.

Part of it is a "why you should give a shit about this even if you're not worried about monetizing your writing" section. That takes up about half. The other half is text instructions with a bunch of screenshots.

 

[Cagivagurl]

I had a few of my stories used without permission on You Tube. What I did was email the channel owner directly and ask for them to be taken down.
Then I started leaving comments of his pages about what a lying thieving bastard the guy was. Mentioned that he pretty much stole my work without permission.
Then I emailed him a note saying I was reporting him to You tube and he could expect to get a notification.
Following my actions, most acted immediately saying they would remove all my stories...
It's an ongoing battle, I note that some stories have popped back up.
It's a very long and convoluted process trying to get You Tube to act.
You have to supply your real name address, and contact information.
Of course you then have to prove how you own you pseudonym. It's impossibly time consuming, and difficult.

 

[NoTalentHack]

Really? I’ve had the exact opposite experience. I’ve done two sweeps through before, reported the videos, and seen fairly swift action. In four cases, the text used on the video has been flagged so that YouTube’s content filter should catch it if a variant is later uploaded; so far, none of them have showed up again. However, I didn’t try to talk to the channel owners first, because fuck those guys. Maybe that was the difference.

ETA: It could also be that I’m based in America and potential differences in copyright law/enforcement. I’m on my third sweep now in order to get screenshots for this document, so I guess we’ll see what happens.

 

[NoTalentHack]

So, fun update. TL;DR: I may have taken down one of the larger channels on YouTube doing this, and most of the text below is taken from / going in the guide.

The first two times I did this, I had to email back and forth with a YouTube Copyright account to establish that I was the writer of the stories. I don't know if they've whitelisted me or whatever, but that didn't happen this time. I woke up this morning to find out that every single request had been honored and all the videos were pulled. Less than 12 hours after I submitted the requests, Bam! All gone.

That's not the best part, though. Three of the stories came from the same channel. Each of these counts as a separate copyright strike, according to Google's rules, and they fall within the 90-day cooling off period required to get a channel banned. They get seven days to appeal, but given that it's blatant theft, and given that other channels have tried before when I challenged them...

These are their numbers as of this morning:

They have stories on there from damned near every Loving Wives author I can think of, and I'm pretty sure from some other folks, too.

If these three copyright strikes get it banned, which YouTube's rules explicitly say they will, the owner of the channel loses all of that: the channel, the subscribers, the uploaded videos, the reliable revenue stream, all of it. A year and a half of effort, gone. Sure, they can open up a new channel with different credentials, but they need to drip-feed videos in order to build engagement, because that’s the way to build up subscribers.

They lose name recognition, too. On a separate computer, I VPNed into a different network, downloaded a new browser, made sure it wasn’t logged into a Google account, and entered “slak” in the search box. It showed up twice in the autocomplete, with the top entry as “slake blake” and the fifth one down as “slake blake stories.”

One pissed off writer, three separate strikes, and *poof*! All gone. Imagine what would happen if we all did this.

God, I hope they send an email begging me to remove the strikes like other channels have. "Eat my entire ass, you thieving fucks" has a nice ring to it.

 

[onehitwanda]

"Eat my entire ass, you thieving fucks" has a nice ring to it.

You are my spirit animal, and you are glorious.

 

[NoTalentHack]

All submitted. Tag choices:

 

[ShelbyDawn57]

Do your instructions tell us how to find out if our stories are being stolen?

 

[NoTalentHack]

Do your instructions tell us how to find out if our stories are being stolen?

Yup. There are sections about why you should care, preparation for the hunt, how to find thieves, and how to lodge complaints.

Also, in the comments, I’ll have a list of channels know have stolen content.

 

[Fatdog25]

Yup. There are sections about why you should care, preparation for the hunt, how to find thieves, and how to lodge complaints.

Also, in the comments, I’ll have a list of channels know have stolen content.

Thank you.

 

[ShelbyDawn57]

Yup. There are sections about why you should care, preparation for the hunt, how to find thieves, and how to lodge complaints.

Also, in the comments, I’ll have a list of channels know have stolen content.

I'll be your guinea pig if you want to shoot me a link.

 

[TheLobster]

All submitted. Tag choices:
View attachment 2369606

I do understand “revenge” but I’m slightly concerned why the copystrike procedure is supposed to include a gangbang…

 

[NoTalentHack]

I do understand “revenge” but I’m slightly concerned why the copystrike procedure is supposed to include a gangbang…

The hope is that enough other writers sign on that it looks like the legal equivalent of that Brazzers couch picture.

 

[NoTalentHack]

I'll be your guinea pig if you want to shoot me a link.

Apparently it got fast tracked! It'll be up tomorrow. One of my beta readers went through the process, and he's gotten twelve videos removed. He'd done it before, though, and this was more of a "oh, I should probably go through it again" for him. However, he did follow the instructions as written, and they worked.

 

[NoTalentHack]

And it's up!

Removing Stolen Stories From YouTube

 

[NoTalentHack]

Update for the curious:
CheatBeatTales, one of the major offenders, is gone; the channel simply no longer exists. They hosted 300+ stolen videos and had nearly 10K subscribers. They did, in fact, receive an "eat my entire ass" response. As a bonus, they have a separate website of the same name with the text of many of the stories that they've stolen posted in bowdlerized form, along with (most of the time) an embedded version of the videos. Well, "had," at least. The site and the stolen text is there, but each of the pages has this gem:



Of note, I only had one stolen story on this channel. This had to be a team effort.

They have a larger sister channel, WhatATale, where they scrub any mention of authors or story names, and a lot of their content is mixed in with stuff that's clearly from Reddit. That's fine. I got time to search up names from your stories, motherfuckers.

SlakeBlake is still up, but that's not necessarily indicative. If they're a YouTube partner, they get a little more latitude, from what I can tell. What I can say is that they've lost about 10% of their content since this started. Playlists on YouTube continue to include non-viewable placeholders for videos that have been removed. SlakeBlake, like a lot of these channels, has a playlist that contains all their videos featuring stolen stories, and the actual number of viewable videos compared to the count listed are short by 35 videos; even though they've added three videos daily, the gap between these two numbers continues to grow.

A few of the smaller channels have had their stock of videos significantly reduced; one is down to six total videos on the channel.

Fuck yeah.



Next up: a Python script! I’ve found that looking at the transcript of a video, grabbing the first line, and searching against Lit’s search in an appropriate category almost always gives a hit on the story. Unfortunately, it takes too long to do that manually, especially the first two steps. But…

 

[Silver_Arrow]

Out of curiosity how worth while is it for them to go through the effort to do all that? 10k subscribers isn't a ton, though If the stories get a ton of views that does equate to $.

 

[NoTalentHack]

Out of curiosity how worth while is it for them to go through the effort to do all that? 10k subscribers isn't a ton, though If the stories get a ton of views that does equate to $.

One channel has ~14M views. While the numbers vary widely from channel to channel, depending on content, popularity, demographic, etc. (those "kids reviewing toys" channels bring in BIG bucks, or at least they did a few years ago) the average creator (probably) gets ~$5 per 1K views. YouTube takes half of that, IIC, so that channel has earned $35K over its lifetime.

Mind you, that's basically passive income for them, and if they're based out of Russia (which the email address attached to this account makes likely), where the average income per year is ~$15K? That's a helluva lot of cash for what is probably 2-4 hours of actual work (I'm not not including the time spent finding the story to steal or letting the TTS bot read it) per video. And that assumes that the average is actually $5. I've seen some estimates that the average is closer to $10 per 1K views. If that's the case? You're talking about a $70K income over the time the channel's been running these videos. This particular channel has only been spinning up these types of videos for 7 months, too, so roughly double these amounts for annual income.

 

[Silver_Arrow]

One channel has ~14M views. While the numbers vary widely from channel to channel, depending on content, popularity, demographic, etc. (those "kids reviewing toys" channels bring in BIG bucks, or at least they did a few years ago) the average creator (probably) gets ~$5 per 1K views. YouTube takes half of that, IIC, so that channel has earned $35K over its lifetime.

Mind you, that's basically passive income for them, and if they're based out of Russia (which the email address attached to this account makes likely), where the average income per year is ~$15K? That's a helluva lot of cash for what is probably 2-4 hours of actual work (I'm not not including the time spent finding the story to steal or letting the TTS bot read it) per video. And that assumes that they're getting the average is actually $5. I've seen some estimates that the average is closer to $10 per 1K views. If that's the case? You're talking about a $70K income over the time the channel's been running these videos. This particular channel has only been spinning up these types of videos for 7 months, too, so roughly double these amounts for annual income.

Huh, thanks for the info. Not that I would put in the effort, but it seems like an easy opportunity for some writers who churn out a lot of content to make a small amount of extra money for the work they have already done.

 

[Inkent]

Thanks to an eagle eyed reader my Ghost on the Wall has cropped up on youTube as Photos That Changed Everything. I've just followed NoTalentHack's article on removing stories from Youtube.

Villain is Audio Story Podcast lets hope this is just a nail in the account coffin!

Will keep you informed as this one rolls along

 

[Inkent]

I've had a very quick look at Audio Story Podcast and they certainly like Litorica as a source of material. I can keep up running through the site manually doing this. For the more tech minded amongst us is there any easier way to pull off the data form Youtube? Second part, do we look at messaging these authors to see if they are aware and provide the link to NoTalentHack's article to remove.

Is it worth picking these off one at time, if we can muster enough Lit writers that may want to put a stop to it?


[TR]
[TD]Youtube title[/TD]
[TD]URL[/TD]
[TD]Credited story[/TD]
[TD]Credited to[/TD]
[TD]ON LIT[/TD]
[TD]1st line text(Youtube)[/TD]
[TD][/TD]

[TD][/TD]

[TD][/TD]

[TD][/TD]

[TD][/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD]My Mom Asked My Wife To Cheat On Me[/TD]
[TD]

[/TD]
[TD]Shock[/TD]
[TD]demander[/TD]
[TD]

TRUE​

[/TD]
[TD]I had my annual physical every August this year it was conducted by a new doctor my old doctor retired the new[/TD]
[TD][/TD]

[TD][/TD]

[TD][/TD]

[TD][/TD]

[TD][/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD]Love With Someone Else's Permission[/TD]
[TD]

[/TD]
[TD]Try Walking in My Shoes[/TD]
[TD]stev2244[/TD]
[TD]

TRUE​

[/TD]
[TD]I was sitting in this bar you know one of those bars that you just have to visit one of those places where truly[/TD]
[TD][/TD]

[TD][/TD]

[TD][/TD]

[TD][/TD]

[TD][/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD]Step To Freedom Through New Love[/TD]
[TD]

[/TD]
[TD]ANOTHER CHANCE[/TD]
[TD]DG Hear[/TD]
[TD]

TRUE​

[/TD]
[TD]since the invention of the internet the lives of most people have changed it got to the point where almost everyone I[/TD]
[TD][/TD]

[TD][/TD]

[TD][/TD]

[TD][/TD]

[TD][/TD]
[/TR]

 

[NoTalentHack]

I'm toying with a Python script to scrape the various channels I find and match them with stories on Literotica. Ideally, we'd all converge on an offending channel at once, because it takes three strikes in a 90-day period to knock a channel out. I don't know how realistic that is, though.