Remove Your Media's takedowns pulled more than 60 videos off Nicholas Light's channel

The asymmetry starts with the filing rate. Remove Your Media's legal representative, Evan F. Stone, told The Verge the company "reports thousands of allegedly infringing links every day," some forwarded by the copyright owners themselves and others found through online searches ^[14]. The Verge reports the company does not feel it needs to extensively review all of a creator's videos to file its takedowns in good faith ^[18]. At the receiving end, Light said over a dozen strikes temporarily pulled more than 60 of his videos ^[7]. Take the floor of both numbers and each strike carried down about five videos ^[21]. The Verge reports a number of other creators have been hit with a similarly inordinate count of strikes ^[10].

Light acknowledged, at the end of the September 6 video, that YouTube had already removed the strikes and told him the channel would not be deleted ^[5]. The strikes were gone before the video announcing them went out. Nothing in The Verge's account places the reversal after the campaign that is being credited with it. He posted the follow-up two days later ^[22], thanking himself and "every single person that contributed" to the ongoing conversation about Remove Your Media ^[6].

Both sides make claims about what viewers do with a reaction video, and neither produces a count. "Commentary, in this context, does not make the use transformative: these videos show the copyrighted work in its entirety, and a great deal of this content sits behind a paywall," Stone said ^[16]. He added: "Add the fact that some viewers are watching these versions rather than the licensed versions, and the effect on the marketplace is real" ^[17]. The word holding that sentence up is "some". The Verge's own description is that viewers can use these videos as a less-than-ideal way to watch copyrighted material without paying ^[11]. Stone also said some clients are "very lenient" with certain types of content, despite their weak fair use defense ^[15].

A vendor's volume turns into exposure for anyone whose revenue sits in a library on somebody else's platform. Look at where the loss lands during the pending window: the filer's cost of being wrong is the time it takes to withdraw a notice; the target's cost was more than 60 videos offline ^[7]. Then look at whether restoration depends on having an audience. Light had 1.3 million subscribers ^[4] and, in his own words, "all the major channels covering this" ^[9]. A creator with a smaller channel gets the same queue and a fraction of the attention.

The Verge does not give the duration for Light's 60 videos ^[7], so the measurable quantity, days of catalog unavailable per strike, is missing. Stone's other argument names the part of a creator's funnel a vendor will aim at. He pointed out that some reaction creators use their free YouTube channels to encourage viewers to subscribe to their paid Patreon pages ^[19], and in Remove Your Media's view the business model "is recording someone watching full episodes and selling those recordings, episode included, behind a Patreon" ^[20]. Light said that "having a video taken down or struck is almost second nature" for people running reaction channels ^[8].