Copyright As Censorship Again: Game Developer Takes Down Scathing YouTube Review

from the and-all-hell-breaks-loose dept

All weekend long folks have been submitting variations on this story of how a company called Wild Games Studio had issued a copyright takedown on an apparently scathing review of one of its games, called Day One: Garry's Incident, done on YouTube by popular gaming reviewer TotalBiscuit (whose name is apparently John Bain in real life). A bunch of articles have been written about this, but the best, by far, is the video explanation Total Biscuit put up himself about the situation. It's about 14 minutes long (7 minutes if you use HTML 5 and speed things up), but well worth it: This video is great on so many levels. First, it explains the basics of the situation and why it's a pure abuse of copyright law. Second, it shows how the head of Wild Games Studio, named "Stephane," both gave him permission (giving him a code for the game, as well as stating publicly that people are free to "make YouTubes" of the game) and then lied about it all, by claiming the takedown was "because Total Biscuit has no right to make advertising revenues with our license." That's legally wrong on so many levels. First of all, not only did Stephane pretty clearly give permission for all this to happen, fair use is pretty clear here as well. The use was for reporting and criticism. Furthermore, TotalBiscuit highlights a bunch of other monetized videos involving the same game that Wild Games Studio did not take down.

But, from there, TotalBiscuit's video gets even more impressive. He doesn't just Streisand Effect Wild Games Studio, calling more attention to the content that the company tried to censor, but he digs into a bunch of other shady practices by the company, including (badly) astroturfing reviews, and accusations that they tried to pump up their Kickstarter campaign (for the same game) by (1) having the CEO of the company pledge $10,000 upfront, and (2) having others pledge high amounts and withdraw them later (suggesting that it was just to make it look like there was momentum for the campaign).

TotalBiscuit doesn't stop there. Next up he calls out YouTube for having a system like this, where censorship can occur so easily based on wholly bogus copyright claims. He points out that YouTube needs to do more to not allow these kinds of things to happen. Of course, YouTube is in a tough spot, seeing as they're also getting slammed by the legacy entertainment industry for not making it even easier to block content on the site.

Finally, he promises that any ad revenue earned from both the video above and the original one that was taken down, will be donated to the EFF, because the EFF remains awesome and continues to fight against such abuse.

After all of this, Wild Games Studio's "Stephane" says that "after seeing all the negative impact today we decided to withdraw our complaint to YouTube." That's an incredibly weak response. It's the equivalent of "if you were offended, I apologize." It's not taking responsibility for the blatant censorship or other abusive behaviors.

And yet there are still some people out there who insist that copyright is never used to censor.

Filed Under: censorship, copyright, fair use, review, streisand effect, totalbiscuit, youtube
Companies: wild games studio