I'm going to warn you:
this video is all about YouTube Drama.
If you're not interested in YouTube drama, please stop watching now, and watch my next video.
I'll be back to speaking English.
And in this video I'm going to speak English,
Because my Vietnamese isn't yet good enough to make a whole video in Vietnamese
without writing a script and practicing beforehand.
It would be a bit slow and not especially graceful.
Of course, this video has subtitles. Go ahead and turn them on if you need to.
Okay, so here's the story:
I'm sure you all remember the video I made with my parents last August
and the huge controversy that erupted from it.
Well, during that controversy, a small channel called Hotra Official—
I think that's how you're supposed to say it, or maybe it's "Hô-Tra"—
Anyway, he made a short video called "Dan Hauer vs Elight in a Nutshell,"
which was a parody of the whole controversy, and . . .
particularly, a parody of Elight's response to it.
Now, one thing I want to point out about that video, which will become relevant later,
is that he didn't use any clips from Elight videos in his video.
It was all drawings that he had done and voices from Google Translate.
I didn't actually find out about his video until about a month after that whole controversy had died down,
and it just popped up in my YouTube recommendations.
I watched it and thought it was really funny, so I shared it on my personal Facebook page.
And that was it.
Until about three weeks ago—so this was at the end of December 2017—
I wanted to watch it again, you know, because it's funny.
But when I searched for it on YouTube, it didn't show up on the search results page.
And then I went to Hotra's channel page, and it wasn't there, either.
So then I started thinking, "Did he delete the video? Why would he do that?"
So then I went to my personal Facebook page and found that post from October where I had shared it,
and when I clicked on the link, this is what I saw:
What?
Remember what I said earlier, he didn't use any clips from Elight in his video,
nor audio, nor still images.
It was all original work.
So after seeing this, I decided to send a message to Hotra.
I don't know him, I've never met him in real life,
but I wanted to know if he knew how this had happened, and how he felt about it.
He told me that he didn't know how it had happened, and he wasn't really too concerned about it,
because it hadn't had a seriously negative effect on his channel, he still had all of his fans,
so he was just going to let it go.
So I thought: "Well, okay, I'll let it go, too. I won't say anything about this publicly."
But then a few days ago he re-uploaded the video, and in the description he included this:
Along with a link that takes you to the original video with the copyright claim.
So, when I saw that, I thought:
"Okay, Hotra now feels like some sort of injustice has been done to him,"
so, I thought: "What the hell, I'll say something about it,"
and I posted this on my Facebook page, Học tiếng Anh cùng Dan, just saying:
"Hey, Elight, why did you make a copyright claim against Hotra's video?
Can you watch it again and explain to all of us what part of the video you own the copyright to?"
I also posted that on my personal Facebook page.
It's been a few days now, and there has been no response from Elight.
So now, I'm putting it here on YouTube, where a lot more people are going to see it.
What's the story, Elight?
Can you explain it?
Now, I want to make something clear here: I'm not yet accusing Elight of anything.
That's why the title of the video is "Are Elight bullies?" not "Elight are bullies."
All I'm saying is I think they should offer an explanation for what happened to Hotra's video,
and I think there could be a reasonable one.
Like, maybe the admin of the Elight YouTube channel just saw Hotra's video,
and took it upon himself or herself to file a copyright claim against it,
without consulting the Elight management beforehand.
And maybe that decision on the part of the admin doesn't reflect Elight management's wishes.
And if that's the case then Elight could explain it,
and tell everyone that they're now going to discipline that admin or maybe let that admin go altogether.
That would be a reasonable explanation and a reasonable response,
but I think some kind of explanation is called for, because . . .
at the moment it really looks like they were just trying to bully a much smaller YouTube channel
for making a video that mocked them.
Now, I want to take a second to pre-emptively shoot down one explanation that I'm guessing a lot of people are going to offer in the comments,
which is:
"Oh, well, maybe it was just some glitch on YouTube.
Maybe the YouTube algorithm caught Hotra's video for a copyright claim automatically."
As far as I know, such a thing is not possible.
YouTube does have a Content ID system that can automatically catch copyrighted material
on the behalf of the copyright owner,
but, as I understand, the Content ID system is only available to very large media producers,
like movie studios, TV studios, record labels, and maybe some of the really, really big YouTube creators,
but for a channel like Elight, I don't think so.
And if you look around YouTube, you can see a lot of Elight videos that have been re-uploaded wholesale,
so do you really think that YouTube wouldn't catch those videos, but then . . .
would catch Hotra's video, which has no copyrighted material?
Also, if it were truly the case that Hotra's video was just caught by some YouTube glitch . . .
that would be one heck of a coincidence,
because, remember, I shared Hotra's video on my personal Facebook page,
and back in August,
on the evening when I first shared the video I made with my parents on my Facebook page,
it got a lot of negative comments there.
Like, a considerably higher proportion of negative comments than it got on YouTube.
And in the heat of the moment I blocked some of those people, I deleted some of those comments,
but I didn't delete all of them, like this one, this one, this one, and this one.
And a couple days ago, I decided to look into some of those people and check out their Facebook profiles.
Well, it turns out that at least four of them are affiliated in some way or another with Akira.
See?
And Akira, as I understand, is Kieu Trang's husband's company.
See here? Akira Young Entrepreneur?
Oh, yep, there's Trang, right there.
Hi, Trang!
Also, one of the comments I deleted came from the admin of the Elight YouTube channel.
I know she's the admin because a long time ago, before I made the video with my parents,
she sent me a message on Facebook asking if I wanted to collaborate with them.
I didn't reply to the message.
So, this video that Hotra made making fun of Elight,
a video that has no copyrighted material at all,
a video which I shared publicly on my personal Facebook page,
a page which, evidently, a considerable number of people affiliated with Akira and Elight
know about and monitor to some extent . . .
that video was just randomly caught by YouTube for a copyright violation?
It's possible, but it doesn't seem very likely.
I think there must have been a human being at Elight with administrative access to the Elight YouTube channel
who saw Hotra's video and made the decision to file a copyright claim against it.
So, lest you think I'm just trying to badmouth Elight
without giving them a chance to tell their side of the story . . .
Elight, I know some of you are going to see this video,
so here's the deal that I'll offer you:
If you want to explain what happened with Hotra's video and this copyright claim,
go ahead and make a short video and upload it to your YouTube channel.
If you do that, I'll share it on both of my Facebook pages,
and even make a short video here on YouTube, saying:
"Ok, everyone, here's Elight's explanation of what happened,"
and I'll put a link on the end screen.
I won't make fun of it or comment on it in any way.
I'll just put it out there for everyone to see and judge for themselves.
The offer is there if you want to take it,
and I'm sure people would be interested to hear what you have to say.
Peace.