Angry Video Game Nerd Gets Tossed Off Youtube?

[Phillyman]

What? Is anyone safe? How is reviewing old games copyright infringement? Are they now saying that the footage in video games is just like movies?

As of this morning, it appears that all of the videos on the well-liked Angry Video Game Nerd webseries have been removed from YouTube. Text on the landing page cites severe violations of YouTube terms of service, which seems to indicate that this wasn't a voluntary move on Rolfe's part.

Chatter on NeoGAF and Facebook point at the copyright complaints related to games Rolfe talked about as the reason for the shutdown.

With a movie in production, things were looking great for James Rolfe, the man behind AVGN. His brand of ranting—where he plays through and excoriates the bad old games of yesteryear—won him millions of fans over the six years he and his crew have been doing AVGN. The backlog of AVGN videos can still be seen on Rolfe's Cinemasscre site. But, with more than more 900,000 subscribers and over 400 million views on YouTube, being exiled from the video service is a major blow to AVGN's visibility and revenue.

Kotaku has reached out to Rolfe and YouTube for comment and will update this story if they respond.

http://kotaku.com/5974112/youtube-shuts-down-popular-angry-video-game-nerd-channel

[ctophil]

Looks like the AVGN's Youtube channel is back up again. I don't think a little copyright issue will put James down. If so, you would have thousands of protesters at Washington D.C. in a matter of days. And you thought the middle east wars were bad. lol. But seriously, all the games he reviewed were over 20 years old. Kinda like the magazines we post here on retromags. People actually take those old games and hack them to create something different all the time without any copyright issues. So I don't see why James would have an issue with just showing content from those games.

[loud]

Sometimes YouTube goes nuclear over a minor copyright infraction, silencing a whole channel only to find out later that there was a brief clip from something the flagging party actually has legal claim to. Then they remove the offending video and restore everything else, but only after the channel lost all the traffic for the days, weeks or sometimes months that it takes to appeal.

Edited January 24, 2013 by loud

[te72]

Seems the channel is up and running as usual. If anything I think YT would be kinda stupid to get rid of his channel. If nothing else, you'd send those nearly million subscribers to Screw Attack or Game Trailers...

[Vaporman87]

Thank goodness this got resolved fairly quickly. I get VERY tired of the copyright communism that seems to be the norm nowadays. I just don't understand some of the decisions that get made by the clowns at YouTube. They should try having some backbone now and then - and if things get too hairy, then back off.