Back in October, popular YouTube personality John Bain, AKA TotalBiscuit, was embroiled in a brief brouhaha with the developers of a poorly received indie game called Day One: Garry’s Incident. The devs of that game, Wild Games Studio, filed a copyright claim against TB’s video to get it pulled down and it hit the fan. News spread quickly about what happened in a classic case of the Streisand Effect and the game and studio were shown in a bad light as a result.

It seems as though people forget things quickly because TotalBiscuit is in a similar kerfuffle with the developers of another game. Guise of the Wolf is another poorly received indie game, this time by FUN Creators. They also used a DMCA claim to remove TB’s video and had the story blow up to Streisandian proportions.

The funny thing is that FUN Creators didn’t stop at the DMCA claim and strike on the YouTube channel. When TB fought back, things got really weird.

As was the case the last time TB got into a mess like this with a developer, he made a first impressions video of Guise of the Wolf under the banner of his signature “WTF Is” series. As these videos are critiques of the video games features, its use of copyrighted materials is permitted under the provisions of US copyright law. Unfortunately, the DMCA claim system on YouTube doesn’t really allow for any fair use claims to be made that might prevent such claims from unfairly taking down videos.

When TotalBiscuit first said that his video for Guise of the Wolf was taken down due to a copyright claim and said that Fun Creators was behind the DMCA strike, the developer denied any knowledge of it. TB went so far as to suggest that it may have been a disgruntled employee issued the DMCA claim without the rest of the company’s knowledge. Before the strike schmozz started, someone at Fun Creators assured a TB fan on the Steam forums that they wouldn’t censor TB’s video.

That denial of making a copyright claim against TotalBiscuit lasted about two days. TB tweeted about the claim on Wednesday and followed up on Friday with some email correspondence from Fun Creators about the strike. In the email, Jasmine from Fun Creators, emailing from the company’s press inquiries email address, claims that they aren’t TB’s enemies, invite legal action and accuse TB of making that video at someone else’s request. It’s all rather odd.

Here’s that email. Click to enlarge.

And then things get really fun. Fun Creators tweeted an accusation to TotalBiscuit suggesting that he faked the whole thing with Photoshop.

In case that tweet gets deleted at some point, here it is in image form.

And they doubled down on the Photoshop accusation saying that they’d fake an email from TotalBiscuit to EA.

TotalBiscuit answered that by getting Zooc, his PR/video editing/graphics person, to produce a video showing that the email is authentic. I don’t know how good Zooc is at video editing but I’d have a hard time believing that anyone could produce a video showing the email and source code in the hour between the email being tweeted publicly and the video being tweeted publicly.

Just to make matter more confusing, Fun Creators even tweeted out the video on their own account and claimed that TB was trolling them.

And then Jasmine at Fun Creators decided to carry on with their attack against TotalBiscuit. They threatened him with a lawsuit if he didn’t shut down his channel and delete all mentions of this incident. This goes beyond censoring a bad review and goes straight to a desire to destroy a man’s livelihood.

They also changed the setup of their discussion forums on Steam by adding a place for criticism referred to as “TB’s Fans Hub.” For someone so small, they sure are paying him a lot of attention.

As for Mr. Biscuit himself, he just wants this over with and has called in the legal beagles to help.

As funny as this story seems from the outside perspective, it also shows the same old problems with YouTube’s copyright system. The fact that a company can get a video taken down because it doesn’t like what it says about them, despite the fact that the video is protected under Fair Use provisions of Copyright Law, is ridiculous. Given that YouTube is turning over most copyright issues to the automated ContentID system, manual DMCA claims are getting so few that it wouldn’t be inconceivable that a YouTube staff team could review DMCA claims for legitimacy before enforcing the claim. Heck, they should be able to do this afterwards if the strike is disputed.

At some point, this claim is likely to be reversed. After all, TotalBiscuit has Maker Studios (operating as Polaris) backing him as his multi-channel network. They have the money and lawyers to fight a seemingly illegitimate claim. Given the circumstances here, the only way this doesn’t get reversed is if TB faked the whole thing which is so extremely unlikely that I’m probably the only person to put that possibility to words besides Jasmine at Fun Creators.

We all thought that developers would learn that it wasn’t good PR to take on big critics after the Day One: Garry’s Incident incident. Maybe next time, people won’t accuse YouTubers of being blackmailed when arguing over copyright strikes.

Source: Reddit

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