Okay.
I have a big update for you today about a truly incredible story that I brought to you
yesterday.
Let me catch you up.
Tuesday night we did a live commentary stream of the democratic presidential debate.
We did it on our Twitch platform.
We are on all sorts of different platforms.
We tend to do the live debate coverage on Twitch, twitch.tv/david Pakman.
About halfway through that debate, our stream was shut down along with the streams of numerous
other left-wing streamers.
Basically at the same time, almost at the exact same time now because of the debate
was on CBS, the assumption was CBS shut down these debate streams, but very quickly something
didn't seem quite right and we started to to to get emails that said that the claimant
was not CBS.
It was instead a company called Praxis political legal.
We did an investigation and immediately we found that the email address listed as the
contact email for these claims by PRAKSIS political legal didn't exist and when I emailed
them, the email instantly bounced back.
We found that the company had almost no online presence whatsoever.
Merely a single page website on one of those website builders called cards with two RS,
C, a, R, R, D, sort of like your website being a political Praxis, political.blogspot.com
that's the equivalent of what they had and it seemed weird.
That's what we knew as of yesterday either CBS hired a very shadowy company with almost
no presence to file mass copyright claims against left wing streamers or this was all
a fraud and this company was claiming to represent CBS when they did not.
Now.
Either way, the effect on us was disastrous.
It put us at risk of a permanent ban from Twitch.
So I immediately contacted a lawyer, contacted Twitch's legal department.
I pointed out there's a lot of red flags here.
I was notified late yesterday towards the end of the day yesterday that Twitch's legal
investigation determined the copyright strikes were bogus.
These scammers tricked Twitch into believing that they represented CBS.
They did not, and they successfully got, I don't know the number, a whole bunch of left
wing streamers shut down.
A number of articles have been written about it.
This vice covered it, Newsweek covered it, the verge covered it.
There's a whole bunch of different articles about it now.
Additionally, while this investigation was going on yesterday, the website for Praxis,
political legal disappeared altogether from the internet just removed.
Very, very odd.
So the right thing was done here in the sense that they determined the strikes were bogus.
They weren't from someone actually representing CBS.
They removed the strike from our account.
Our account on Twitch has been reinstated.
That's the good news.
The bad news is, and this is not getting enough attention.
The bad news is the broken dysfunctional system that exists on both YouTube and Twitch for
dealing with copyright issues because both YouTube and Twitch have a system where anybody
claiming that, uh, their copyright is being violated can almost instantly have live streams
and videos taken down.
And then it becomes the responsibility of the publisher, me, us to prove that either
the claim was fraudulent, that we were authorized because we have a license or fair use or whatever
to broadcast or publish that content.
It's sort of ban now, ask questions later.
And this can take 24 hours.
It could take 48 hours, it can take 30 days.
It can sometimes take months because that is how long YouTube keeps copyright strikes
on until they eventually fall off on Twitch.
They never fall off.
Although there's rumors that they're looking at changing that.
So the right outcome ultimately prevailed here, but it's a broken system.
The system, you know, I, I was thinking about Trump and the founding fathers hear me out.
The founding fathers set up checks and balances and they never imagined that a president would
come in and simply ignore the checks and balances which Donald Trump has done.
And then what happens?
It turns out nothing happens.
There've been no consequences to Donald Trump for flouting norms and checks and balances.
The creators of YouTube and Twitch may never have imagined that bad faith fraudulent actors
would show up.
While an important event for our democracy is taking place, a presidential debate and
file a massive number of bogus copyright claims effectively shutting down endless, uh, of
the, the viewership for thousands and tens of thousands of people that were watching
these streams.
So the system has to be changed.
They should have to show that their copyright is being violated.
They must have to prove that they are actually authorized representatives of the copyright
holder because otherwise, even though in this one instance it was quote solved, the same
thing will happen either next week or next month or whenever we're covering events important
to our democracy and it will continue to jeopardize the livelihood of independent media creators
like us.
Ban first ask questions later, which is employed by YouTube.
It's employed by Twitch.
It doesn't work.
And if anything, what we've learned from this is, okay, if everybody gets together and spends
almost 24 consecutive hours researching and doing our own investigations and hiring our
own lawyers, we can get one strike reversed.
But this doesn't change the system that is so acutely broken.
Uh, and that's what we, we need to focus on one way or the other.
I don't know how to
do it.