I awoke this morning to a barrage of messages from fans of mine wondering where my content had gone. I checked my channel and sure enough, it had been removed from YouTube.

I run an amateur gaming channel, with about 15,000 subscribers at the time of it being terminated. Fairly small, but a notable achievement, and the videos I’ve made make decent money. I love making content and interacting with the community I’ve built.

Here’s the problem. My handle is Vice. I’ve gone by Vice on the internet for forever, it’s been my gamertag for years, and when I made my YouTube channel I didn’t think to change it. I was aware there was already a channel under the name, but it’s a fairly common word, and I didn’t think I’d find as much success as I did. Before I knew it, it was too late to change as it was already a big part of my branding in the Rust community.

The worst I thought I’d have to deal with was never showing up in search results, always being flooded out by a large media company. But as I’ve learned, apparently I’m a threat to them.

Now, this isn’t one of those cases where it’s a blatant misuse of trademark law, like in 2016 where the same VICE Media tried to force a band named ViceVersa to change their name. ViceVersa were in the clear there. Me, less so. My YouTube name is the same as theirs, save for it not being capitalized: