[meowface]

You overwhelmingly deserved it. Seriously. I'm not saying this to be a dick or to be cruel; I'm basing it solely on what you wrote in your blog post.

You made a bot that did absolutely nothing but steal content from other creators and upload it on your own channel for views and ad revenue. This is not only obviously a violation of YouTube's ToS, but also obviously illegal and unethical. They banned it after three separate strikes.

This is unedited and uninterrupted, from your blog:

>Flash forward to the beginning of this year and my agency AMG told me about this amazing new thing on YouTube called: Shorts. If you’re unfamiliar shorts are sub sixty second videos shot in horizontal format. Basically, they’re TikToks on YouTube and YouTube was pushing them HARD. With some quick tests, I figured out that a channel with no subs was getting more short video views than my main channel by over ten-fold.

>This is exactly where my tech mind jumped in. I obviously had the first thought any developer has. Can I automate it? I mean countless clips were just freely available on twitch. Heck, they were even sorted by most viewed. I’d seen many successful top clip channels on youtube. All I had to do was edit them into short-form content and bam free real-estate right? Armed with google colab, which is way too powerful to be free by the way, I was well on my way to my demise.

>Honestly, it was easier than I even expected. In the beginning, I had dreams of grandeur. I was doing lots of machine learning in my free time and so I was imagining fancy ml algos that automagically found the webcam and edited the video the clips into amazing short-form content. Of course after about an hour I just settled on the easiest shit that worked. Use a headless browser to rip the clips from twitch, some FFmpeg magic to format them, and then another headless instance to upload to YouTube (on a side note did you know YouTube’s own upload API won't let you PUBLISH videos unless you have a fully-fledged approved app and even then you can’t even choose the game title when uploading). I learned so many cool tricks about web automation, authentication, and video editing here but again a story for another time.

>All you really need to know is that at the end of the day I had a working system. It would take the top x number of twitch clips for any given game in the last 24hrs and edit them into shorts. It would then go and upload them to YouTube and TikTok. Once I had it set up I made twenty different short channels. It worked even better than I expected. Short-form content was pushed so hard that some of the channels even passed my main channel in subs. The Minecraft Shorts channels specifically hit 30k subs and Call Of Duty Shorts hit 40k follows on TikTok! It was honestly really cool to see it work out so well but nothing good lasts forever.

This is purely parasitic content theft. It's not good. It's the opposite of fair use. It would be a major injustice if they reinstated your account. If the strikes did all come at once as you suggest (but which you weren't able to confirm, it seems?), the scope and degree of the infringement left them no other option. If you make a new channel on YouTube, please just make your own content in the future instead of trying to profit from other people's.

In all honesty, you'll probably look back at this in a few years and feel grateful. Even if it wasn't permanently banned, if you ever wanted to actually start using your channel for real in the future, it would've had this immense and indelible smirch on it, which the community probably would have dug up and pilloried you for once it inevitably bubbled up to the level of a scandal. This kind of behavior also isn't a good look for employers, due to the liability and many other reasons.

I think you should consider this a good lesson and move on from it and completely dissociate from anything tied to this old misadventure. This is a chance at a fresh reset that you otherwise might not have ever received.

[abrownbag]

That's the thing! If you read the post I NEVER received ANY warnings... Legit just banned for three strikes over night with NO emails about any of the copyright strikes. No way to appeal or contact youtube about what videos had strikes or on what channel. All I have is speculation based on the termination emails I received.

I need to make this clear now. NONE of the videos were MONETIZED... None of the channels reached watch-time criteria to be monetized because youtube doesn't count shorts. ALL clips where EDITED into shorts and given proper attribution back to the streamers with links in the description and video etc. Some of the streamers even commented and I was able to pin/promo their streams in the comments as well!

MY MAIN CHANNEL. That is ALL purely my content was INCLUDED in the ban. I made the shorts channel in the youtube channel switcher section and they didn't have emails associted. Somehow I could still get emails to my [e-mail] account through random page emails like: [e-mail] (they route to my main I guess?)

I'm sorry that I'm not a very good writer and didn't detail all this in my medium post but I was definitely NOT just ripping content as my own and getting paid for it. I only had revenue from my MAIN channel which was terminated with the rest.

[meowface]

I've revised my post to cover the copyright strike situation as you state here. If I understand correctly, you don't actually know if you received the three strikes overnight, right? I imagine it's possible the notices were somehow sent to an email you didn't realize was connected, and if that's the case, the notices might have actually spanned more than one day and you just didn't realize until the final one came.

I agree that you have a right to obtain the notices. Hopefully they provide them to you. But, either way, I'm pretty sure you won't be and shouldn't be getting your account back.

I think even if it turns out they did send you all three strikes at the same instant, they would still be completely in the right here due to the channel apparently being so dedicated to bad faith content pinching and infringement. It probably could've theoretically racked up dozens of strikes.

And it doesn't matter if you gave attribution. You only didn't monetize them because your account wasn't (yet) able to - you surely would have if you had the option. You said it yourself:

>With no way for me to really monetize them, I stopped running the scripts (which would be around the beginning of this month).

Giving attribution is better than not giving attribution, but it's still not close to sufficient. There are lots of channels that make tons of stolen profit off of creators (mostly TikToks and Twitch streams; fancy that...) through ads, sponsorship deals, affiliate links, etc. You very probably would've ended up like all those other exploitative, parasitic content-stealing channels after enough time if you could have and if YouTube didn't shut it down.

Some/many probably use bots like you tried to. They often include attribution. They never include consent from the creators they steal from, and they give the creators they steal from 0% of the profits they make from those creators' stolen content.

The creators often don't even know it's happening. "It's free promotion!" is not a good excuse; if you actually wanted to be a legitimate promoter, you would have done it legitimately, by contacting people and offering such services and working out a content uploading and revenue sharing agreement with each individual ahead of time.

[abrownbag]

I never received any emails about strikes no even though I would get notification emails about comments etc to [e-mail] through those randomly generated page emails? I'm not sure how youtube works when you don't make the channels with an email.

I would just like to put on record it was never my intention to steal from other content creators. The initial idea came as a service I could provide to streamers. I pivoted as one of my streamer friends became popular through a popular clip channel. I figured Instead of trying to charge my friends for a service if I could get one clip channel big enough I could just reproduce that success for all our own clips...

I mean like the first rule of tech is don't be a dick right???

I just feel like it's very unfair of you to assume I'd eventually go down a specific route before it played out.

Also losing my entire livelihood for a programming project hurts enough even without your words.

[meowface]

>I would just like to put on record it was never my intention to steal from other content creators.

I believe you. But that's still what you ended up doing.

>The initial idea came as a service I could provide to streamers.

Then why didn't you make it a service you could provide to streamers, instead of skipping the service and agreement part and just uploading the content first without their knowledge? A little like offering a security service by showing up outside a store with a gun and taking some money off of each customer in exchange for the protection you're graciously providing to the store owner (who has no idea this is going on). Not saying what you did is at all like a protection racket; just trying to illustrate that the difference between a service and a racket is full, up-front consent and explicit agreements.

>I pivoted as one of my streamer friends became popular through a popular clip channel. I figured Instead of trying to charge my friends for a service if I could get one clip channel big enough I could just reproduce that success for all our own clips...

Why not provide this service for your friends for free and offer it to everyone else for a fee, then? (I get the actual reason; I'm just saying it's wrong. Unfortunately, many [not all] "growth hacks" are unethical.) I understand your intention here, but it seems like you may have been placing your friends above strangers to the point of not fully thinking about how the strangers were affected.

>Also losing my entire livelihood for a programming project hurts enough even without your words.

The project could've generated clips and you could've reached out to creators and showed them how the bot worked, with examples, and worked out an arrangement with anyone who was interested. It would've been the same programming project, except it would be ethical, legal, and perhaps directly profitable.

I'm not trying to roast you here at all. You don't seem like a malicious person. You're forthright about what you did. I just think this is a lesson you should take to heart and something you should move on from. If I were you I'd probably be trying to scrub all evidence of this, honestly, instead of trying to make a big deal of it. I know it stings a lot right now, but, trust me, I think you'll be very thankful for this in the future, even if it doesn't seem like it at the moment. Cut your losses.

[ipaddr]

"why didn't you make it a service you could provide to streamers, instead of skipping the service and agreement part "

Wait a minute. How would youtube know if he signed an agreement or not? Even if he did sign them youtube would have closed down the channel.

We have seen this before with more legimate channels and I highly doubt an agreement would have mattered.

[meowface]

YouTube isn't the one sending these takedown notices. People send the takedown notices to YouTube, and then they take required action afterwards.

Presumably, people who signed an agreement would not send takedown requests. As you mention, there are cases where this does sometimes mistakenly happen, like if someone is being represented by some agency or firm and they don't realize the content is part of the agreement, but it should be disputable in those cases, and usually will get resolved.

(It's true that sometimes it takes too long for those cases to get properly resolved, but that's a separate thing. I'm definitely not saying IP management on YouTube is perfect - there's plenty of abuse and errors in the copyright system. This just isn't one of those situations.)

[httpsterio]

His friends wouldn't obviously strike their own videos on the clip channel. Or the service would've provided his friends with the clips and they could upload them to their own channels.

[httpsterio]

You aren't actually entitled to three strikes. Just one blatant infringement is legally enough to terminate your account. YouTube neither has any guarantee that even I'd you get any notices that they're spanned out with says between. If you have more than 3 videos and they all get a strike at the same time, well then it's bye bye to the accounts.

And honestly, if you have 1 legit account and 20 operating on more sketchy waters, it's only reasonable that they ban all of your channels.