I want to address a situation around some YouTube copyright strikes (since retracted) issued by The Verge and Vox Media that has gotten pretty toxic, and could have been avoided if the parties involved had simply reached out to me directly.

Early this week, a number of YouTube reaction videos were flagged to Vox Media's legal team, who are very diligent and protective of our work. Two of them were reactions to a PC build video we had made several months ago which I determined did not meet our standards and had pulled from YouTube.

Those two reaction videos used 90 percent of our footage without any edits, cuts, or otherwise transformative use, and one of them in particular featured what our legal team felt was a pretty racist character. Our legal team felt this was not fair use, and issued a copyright strike request to YouTube for those two videos. A number of other very critical videos were not responded to in any way.

YouTube notified the two channels in question, said there was a chance our request wouldn't make it through, and asked our legal team for their case. Our team made the case, YouTube agreed the videos were not fair use, and issued the strikes.

When this was brought to my attention a few hours later, I told them that although I fully agreed with their legal argument, I did not think we should use copyright strikes against legitimate channels even if we thought the videos crossed the line. (And again, I fully agree with our legal team that these videos crossed the line of fair use.)

At my direction, the strikes were retracted. Here's the note from YouTube:

Again, the strikes were retracted at my specific instruction, not through any YouTube dispute process. The Verge has written many times about the problems with YouTube's copyright enforcement mechanism, and I do not think it works well enough for us to use it in cases like this.

One thing I did not do was tweet about it, because I didn't think the nuance of this situation would lend itself to tweets, and also quite honestly because I didn't think it was a big deal. There were strikes, and the strikes were retracted. I assumed everyone would move on.

I did, however, respond to every single person who reached out to me directly. I know it's everyone because only three people actually did that.

The Verge's YouTube channel has since been brigaded with dislikes and nasty comments, and there are now death threats we have to think about. Here's one:

This is all pretty disappointing, especially since I had retracted the strikes and none of the people involved thought it important to simply ask me about it. I hope everyone involved can take a moment and think about making sure they actually know what they think they know, and the value of communicating directly instead of simply reacting.