This incredible piece is the work of 20-year-old YouTuber DoodleChaos, who has been making intricate animations and marble run videos for over six years.

In the 4 weeks since the video was published, DoodleChaos' masterpiece has been viewed on YouTube over 3 million times, featured on the popular animation site Cartoon Brew, and gilded an astounding 78 times on Reddit. His YouTube subscriber base has also nearly quintupled in size.

But unfortunately, not all of the attention has been good.

The curse of Internet popularity

Any time an Internet video becomes popular, it is at risk of being stolen and reuploaded—and with no watermark or other identification in the video itself, DoodleChaos' video was a prime candidate. Within days of its launch, stolen copies of the video started to appear on Facebook. Mentes en caos, Zoomin.TV VIRAL, and GAMINGbible, to name a few, all uploaded the video via their own pages rather than linking to or embedding the YouTube original. Some gave credit to DoodleChaos and some did not, but none of these pages asked the creator for permission.

Sadly, the stolen copies of the video quickly outpaced the success of the original: the Facebook reposts alone reached over 20 million views within four days, while the original version on YouTube was still sitting at a measly million.

What is freebooting?

This act of reuploading a video for your own gain without the creator's permission is called freebooting. Freebooting is theft, plain and simple, and a clear violation of copyright law—but that doesn't stop thousands of Facebook pages from leeching off of content creators without ever getting caught. Many articles and videos have been published about freebooting already, but suffice to say that it's a widespread problem that affects countless hard-working creators, and that is even encouraged by Facebook's video algorithms. (More links about that after the article.)

What's the big deal, you say? Well, DoodleChaos spent over a month of his free time creating this masterpiece, but the other pages and sites are reaping the benefit from his hard work: they get exposure and/or ad revenue every time someone watches the video on their page.

DoodleChaos estimates that the freebooted copies of his video have been watched 40 million times to date. Imagine what those views could have done if people had watched the original on YouTube instead: using one site's estimates, he could have made $44,000 in ad revenue alone.

Meeting DoodleChaos

This is where I came in. I consider myself somewhat of a freebooting vigilante—as a video creator myself, I find it very upsetting when I see creators' content being used by others without their permission, and I try when I can to contact and warn the original creators. At least a few offending videos have been taken down as a result of my pestering, and I'm proud of it.

I actually saw the "Line Rider - Mountain King" video on Facebook before I found it at its proper home on YouTube. I loved the video and thought the creator deserved credit, so I did some research and got in touch with Mark Robbins, alias DoodleChaos.

I sent Mark the freebooted links I found and helped him report the violations, and he was very grateful and forthcoming. He graciously agreed to answer some questions for this article about his experience with this video and the subsequent freebooting.

Read our exclusive interview below:

Interview with Mark Robbins (aka DoodleChaos)

Peter C. Davidson: This video has been very successful, garnering over 3 million views on YouTube in just a few weeks. How did you feel when this video started taking off? What has been the reaction so far?

Mark Robbins: It’s a very strange feeling to describe. I felt very overwhelmed. I’m currently a junior in college, so I was trying to respond to emails and posts on Reddit with my phone while I was in lecture. It was quite distracting I must say. Seeing friends watch my video without knowing it was me that made it is a surreal feeling.

PCD: How did you first find out that your video was being freebooted?

MR: I discovered things had gotten out of hand first when you emailed me a link to the Facebook page Mentes en caos. A bit later my roommate showed me one of his Facebook friends had shared it as well. There was nothing mentioning my channel or original video anywhere. At first I was unsure what to do. After some help from you finding the Facebook copyright claim site, I filled out all the information as fast as I could and submitted it to Facebook. Within a few hours I was denied, with the following message: