#copy-knight

[echoekhi]

Hello!

First I want to say thank you. Your project has helped me in the past by letting me know about a YouTube video that stole my work. I was able to get those taken down without fuss thanks to you. I’m going to join your discord and see if I can help out in any way, since this whole thing has sparked some drive in me.

The problem now is that same fic was posted once again without my permission by a different channel. I went through the same process, but this channel is fighting me a lot more on it. They’ve issued a counter strike to my copyright strike, and the YouTube email says I need legal evidence within 10 days to keep the video down. I’ve offered to take back the strike if they delete my video, but they are also resisting that. They want me to take it back first, which definitely feels like a trap.

Have you ever run across this problem before? I don’t know how to get any legal proof and I’m not sure I would have time to get some even if I did. What does your project do when I channel fights back like this?

The channel is called DN WhatIf 4.0 btw

Hope this isn’t too much of a bother, thank you

A similar thing happened before with another channel, and OTW Legal was able to convince YouTube to reject their counter-notice altogether and their account was terminated successfully. Just contact them here:

Just a reminder that this channel is still out there scamming authors and tricking them into giving permission by using incomplete solicitations (podfic requests without quoting their account link). If you get a suspicious message from a 'podficcer', ask for their account link first and when in doubt, run a check on them here:

[echoekhi]

One of my fics was identified as scraped to YouTube (thank you for the notice about it), and I followed the instructions to fill out the copyright strike (including posting my fic’s ao3 link where a link is required.) I got an email asking for me to provide the source again, and I did, and then today I got a notice that my YouTube account was deleted because YouTube determined my claim was fraudulent.

I may be able to contest it, but I wanted to let you know how this developed for me in case it became an ongoing trend.

This is the first time something like this happened. The weird thing is 4 other claims by other authors against the same channel successfully got through, so that uploader will get terminated anyways. Definitely appeal it with YouTube, I looked over the video contents and the claim should be completely valid. If you need legal advice, you can reach out to OTW's legal team here: https://www.transformativeworks.org/contact_us/. We can provide a copy of the video transcript as evidence if needed.

[echoekhi]

Hiya, I received a notif from Project Copy-Knight that one of my fics had been stolen.

Thank you, first of all, for putting in the work to get it up and running and for letting me know! I'm not sure about filing a DMCA complaint, though, because it requires me to give a bunch of personal info that I'm not comfortable with giving (e.g. phone number, signature, etc). Do you have any advice on that, or is it just something to figure out on our own if we're comfortable with?

Hi, unfortunately this is a common problem for a lot of the authors we have contacted. We are looking into ways around this, including setting up a DMCA agent to act on the authors' behalf while keeping their anonymity, collaborating with either companies or NGOs to offer this service, but unfortunately these things take time and we currently don't have this set up yet.

At the moment, we recommend that 1) you talk to your lawyer about this; 2) if you don't have a lawyer, you can try contacting OTW's Legal committee to see if they can help; or 3) wait around 2 weeks, at which point we should be able to start offering this at a small scale in a test-run.