TotalBiscuit’s Negative Review Flagged, Removed from YouTube

Posted on October 20, 2013, CJ Miozzi TotalBiscuit’s Negative Review Flagged, Removed from YouTube

UPDATE: TotalBiscuit has posted a video about the incident; scroll down to view it.

Indie dev Wild Games released Day One: Garry’s Incident a little under a month ago. Popular YouTuber John “TotalBiscuit” Bain was sent a review code, and after he uploaded a scathing review to his channel, Wild Games filed a copyright claim. As per policy, YouTube took down the video.

In his video — which went out to his over 1.2M subscribers — TotalBiscuit describes elements of Garry’s Incident as “horrendous” and “awful,” particularly the game’s framerate, saying that “the game does run dreadfully.”

Wild Games issued the following statement on the game’s Steam forums:

“We protected our copyright because Total Biscuit has no right to make advertising revenues with our license.”

TotalBiscuit’s side of the story, which he related via Twitter, tells a tale of censorship:

“Well, cat is out of the bag since someone on Reddit found it. My Day One: Garrys Incident video was copyright flagged by the devs”

“I should point out that this is a game I was sent review code for, it was also the top-ranked video on Youtube for that game.”

“It is fairly obvious what they are doing here, abusing Youtubes copyright system to censor criticism of their product.”

“This happened 2 days ago, we contacted them for an explanation and have heard nothing. Giving them til Monday to respond before goin nuclear”

“It should be pointed out that US Fair Use doctrine exists in particular to protect criticism from being censored in such a way”

“It is a pro-consumer doctrine and with good reason. Maker and Polaris will come down on them like a ton of bricks come Monday.”

“Long story short. Dev sends code, code used to make critique, dev dislikes critique, dev abuses system to censor critique.”

“Its annoying that this had to come out, we were trying to solve it privately, but hey, copyright claims are public viewing on Youtube.”

“If I’ve seemed a little grumpy over the last few days now you know why. Dev attacks my livelihood for doing my job, silently fuming for days“

TotalBiscuit believes his review was censored because it was negative; Wild Games asserts it was taken down due to the review being monetized. It seems TotalBiscuit will be challenging the copyright claim.

Do you believe TB was censored?

via Indie Statik