How MagnatesMedia Almost Got DELETED

I recently received an email from YouTube to say that a user had filed three copyright strikes against my channel and thus in seven days my channel would be permanently deleted this meant all of my videos this channel I've spent years building and my entire livelihood was going to be taken away now for those who don't know my name's John and even though this channel is called magnates media I'm not some big media company I started this channel by myself making very basic videos talking to a camera but over several years I've gradually leveled up the videos and now make mini business documentaries with the help of a couple of great editors but I'm still just a guy with a YouTube channel and this is my full-time income that I've poured years of work into so the idea of everything just being suddenly deleted was genuinely devastating the reason this was happening was because of a guy called Alex Edson who bought the YouTube channel business casual one night he filed three copyright strikes against me claiming I used a couple of seconds of similar footage and I literally do mean two or three seconds he was claiming in videos that are 20 or even 50 plus minutes long these are videos that took me and my small team hundreds of hours to make what's crazier still is the footage he was claiming was literally public domain images with a basic animation applied meaning he didn't own these images you can see here the images he claimed are available all over the Internet and not just that my editor had applied different effects to the images and so when the first copyright strike came in and I saw it was from another Creator I immediately reached out to Alex thinking there must be a mistake I sent him an extremely friendly email basically saying you have a great Channel I'm so sorry I've made it has used something similar you're not happy with can we please have a chat so we can work this out between us now at this point even though I didn't think I'd done anything wrong I wasn't really sure what the issue was and I didn't want any trouble or hard feelings so I was more than happy to make changes to my video or show him proof of my editor's work or anything else I figured we could surely sort this out between us however instead Alex Edson then spent the next few hours going through all my other videos so he could find two other videos to fall strikes against and to be clear he wasn't just trying to take my address Revenue fighting three copyright strikes means a channel gets terminated in seven days and Alex knew that by filing the strikes in quick succession I wouldn't even be able to post videos on my channel anymore to tell people what was happening because if you have three strikes you can't upload so when I saw he'd filed even more copyright strikes even after my first email I sent another email to Alex asking why he was doing this and if we could find a way to resolve this amicably surely he didn't actually want to delete my entire Channel over a few seconds of similar footage right but the only response I ever got from Alex Edson was one email in which he sent me this photo of our two videos side by side he told me bluntly that my actions would not be viewed favorably in federal courts in other words A Veiled Threat he would sue me and he then demanded an apology for what he called egregious and unlawful Behavior now several of you have since pointed out the reason he was demanding an apology so forcefully is because he could then weaponize that to file a lawsuit against me because it turns out he literally did that exact thing to another channel before in fact their apology is literally his Twitter with a cover photo but at this point I forwarded the screenshot Alex sent me to my editor who quickly responded saying he'd never even heard of business casual's Channel my editor confirmed the image in question was a public domain image it's a photo from 1905 showing Carnegie steel mill as you can see here it's also available here and here and you get the idea basically Alex Edson does not own the copyright for this image or any of the images he gave me copyright strikes for but not just that I think compared the couple of seconds Alex claimed in my video and realized it doesn't even look the same as his video my editor had added custom effects like explosions Flames smoke and color correction to this Public Image in the screenshot Alex sent me he's Frozen our videos at the one second where they're a little similar but if you watch the video the effects are completely different and my editor even recorded his editing timeline to prove he created these custom effects himself plus we are literally talking about a couple of similar seconds in a video that's over 53 minutes in length whereas Alex's video on the topic is only about 15 minutes so I think contacted Alex again and tried to explain all this but this time he just completely ignored my message now I want to clarify that if I or my editors had literally just ripped several minutes of footage from his videos and simply copied it into my own video with no edits I would at least understand the strikes but that is not the case at all we are literally talking about a couple of seconds of footage that's not even identical and involving images he doesn't own the rights to and yet he'd now filed three copyright strikes so I couldn't upload any videos the message in my YouTube studio now simply said your YouTube channel will be terminated soon along with any Associated channels unless you are able to resolve your strikes and I was given a 7 Day countdown before everything would be deleted obviously at this point I was feeling crushed by all this but I was also confused creators almost never file copyright strikes against each other because they know it can literally take away someone's livelihoods I mean for me personally I see lots of people make similar videos to me or even reuse parts of my content but if I had an issue I'd always at least try to speak to them first I wouldn't just go to immediately deleting their Channel and so the fact Alex Edson had filed three strikes in quick succession over a couple of seconds of footage and the fact he wasn't willing to even discuss it Paul suggested he was intentionally trying to get my channel deleted and silence me I guess technically he must view me as a competitor Channel someone sent me this graph showing that his channel was stagnating whilst mine had huge momentum and so they wondered if that's why he chose now to Target me I don't know all I do know is that I have almost 250 videos I've spent years making and only a small fraction are on a similar topic to business casual yes we both make business videos but the majority of topics are totally different and even the videos that are on the same topic are in different styles with different analysis obviously if two creators make a video about the same person there will inevitably be some similarities or some of the same sources or images used but Everyone's entitled to make videos about famous entrepreneurs if they want to because if we're saying that just using the same public photo and applying a similar animation is breaching copyright and worthy of Channel termination it surely sets an extremely dangerous precedent for all of YouTube it could have terrible consequences for creators and fair use if people can just delete other creators channels like that thankfully most creators would never do something like this but it shows how easily the copyright system can be weaponized but anyway at this point Alex Edson wasn't responding I couldn't post on my own channel because of the three strikes and I had a countdown of 7 days before my channel was deleted it's fair to say I was pretty stressed at this point but I do want to clarify two things firstly this was not YouTube's faults YouTube did not flag my content as infringing on anyone's copyrights this is all because Alex Edson manually went through all my content found a couple of seconds he thinks is similar to his video and issued three strikes so my channel gets deleted and by law YouTube has to comply with these takedown notices as a great Creator Tom Scott once said YouTube's copyright system isn't broken the world says secondly I want to stress the original creator of business casual who actually made most of the videos is a guy called Jordan and he is not to blame for any of this in fact I've been able to chat with some of the other people who worked on business casuals videos and they seem like great people who enjoy making content same as I do but then Alex Edson bought the channel and in the last few years Alex has only posted one new video and that was an almost two hour video about how he was suing YouTube and another Channel this was obviously worrying as it shows I was dealing with someone who has a history of repeatedly filing lawsuits but I also thought it was strange that given Alex had spent so much money to buy this channel why was he spending so much time suing people instead of making content and that's when I decided to do a little more research on Alex Edson and this is where things start to get much crazier [Music] a quick search of Alex Edson led me to this comment from someone who once worked on the business casual YouTube channel in which he stated Alex Edson did not create business casual he purchased the channel and he also ran an MCN called Power TV which if you do some digging into reveals some super Shady stuff I get why he'd like to prop himself up as some self-made YouTuber who just likes to make videos but he's far from it so I did some research and verified Alex Edson did indeed run an MCN called Power TV and that there were a staggering number of accusations against him for example there's an old tweet from keemstar saying power TV is a YouTube MCM that's false flagging a Creator who made a video exposing their Network for being shady in other words someone called the network out and then Alex had some false flagged their video to get it taken down but then just look at the replies underneath this one tweet the guy Alex that runs it is a dirtbag that hit me over when I was with them I wasn't even in this guy's Network and I've seen this guy's wrongdoings Kevin MMP issue is one of many this guy has caused this is just scratching the surface a lot of Partners and prior partners are scared to speak up due to Legal threats this is probably the least done he's done so many other things power TV is so shady worst MCN out there I have a feeling he dislike bottomed my channel after he realized I recorded some sexist remarks I think I could gather at minimum a dozen people to testify against this guy crappy sexist third party Network he tried to ruin the life of a 17 year old artist that didn't want to repartner with them they're also screwing me over told me a bunch of stuff to sign a long contract and not doing any of it I was in their Network for a month they definitely were Shady to say the least if you look into this in detail you will find the most unbelievable stories and this was literally just from one Twitter thread there was so much more like this tweet from a Creator who said he lost his YouTube channel because of Alex Edson and that Alex then blatantly deleted all the promises he'd made under that someone commented that Alex used to try and get other people to false flag creators videos and follow fraudulent reports against them they also said they used to be his head of Recruitment and brought on some big clients for Alex but then didn't get paid and indeed Alex did have some big clients he used to be Jake Paul's manager early in his career but then there were also other screenshots showing Alex Edson had threatened to take down other people's channels in the past as well as allegations that Alex had made creators in his Network lose access to various YouTube features if they tried to speak out against how abusive his network was all whilst taking the majority of their earnings and trapping them in predatory contracts they couldn't get out of now whilst Alex got most of the videos taken down that criticized him some of these videos speaking out are still public and you can see there are quite a few creators whose lives Alex has tried to ruin for example there was tag animations the 17 year old who tried to speak out against Alex but then Alex threatened to get him banned from PayPal email his employer Best Buy to get him fired and place an ic3 police report on him this also claims Alex Edson aggressively requested power TV's thumbnail designer a miner to sign a contract with a 250 000 breach of exclusivity penalty if he decided to partner with another Network Ever After The Miner refused Alex allegedly requested a refund of all prior payments to him by filing PayPal chargebacks to try and rip him off for the work he'd already done at this point I then discovered a series made by a Creator called upper echelon where he looked into Alex Edson in more detail for example he just covered how after power TV electronic company called mail tag which has loads of reviews saying it was a scam as customers couldn't cancel their subscriptions and kept getting charged it turns out that a veritable Army of disgruntled users could be found lamenting the exact same thing and in the case of Felix josman in his Twitter thread which detailed evidence of the problem Alex Edson also tried to threaten him with a cease and desist claiming that if the thread was not removed Swift legal action would follow Flash Forward years later and the thread still exists once again demonstrating that Alex Edson has a repeated pattern of weaponizing the legal system against anyone who tries to fight back ever accounts of alleged malpractice by Alex Edson during his days at the helm of mailtag are everywhere Alex then sold this company to two other people and there's articles out there about what happened but here's one summary Ben and Joe thought they had found the perfect acquisition Target in mailtag.io turns out they spent six figures on a nightmare of a software as a service company and it all started when the ex-ceo of the acquired company forgot to pay his stripper and yes this story is as crazy as it sounds but basically it seems that using the money from Power TV and mail tag Alex Edson then bought the YouTube channel business casual for just under a million dollars and people have claimed he wanted to copyright the color and font of the channel so he could later sue people who used them I guess since he ended up making a big loss on the channel he was looking for other ways to monetize it instead of actually making content because a little while later he then tried to sue YouTube and made a video about it however I spoke with several copyright lawyers during this whole ordeal and they told me his video was full of lies firstly there were some just blatantly wrong information like he made a big deal of how a channel had digitally erased his Watermark but the watermark wasn't part of the video it's just the standard overlay YouTube ad to the video player it's not part of the actual content secondly he claimed YouTube was suppressing his video to silence him despite the fact that the video got widely pushed in people's recommendations got over 2.2 million views and is literally the 13th most viewed video the channel has ever posted despite being the most recent video but Alex tried to make out like YouTube had some kind of Shadow campaign against him and that anyone who questioned him was part of this Shadow campaign thirdly he created some narrative about how YouTube is part of some Russian conspiracy even though YouTube has been issuing various sanctions against Russia like blocking state-funded media channels honestly there were so many things in this video that people had issues with but you wouldn't know that if you looked at the comments because Alex Edson Mass deletes any comments that remotely questioned anything he says this Twitter user summed it up by saying Alex recently made a flawed video where he makes a big deal out of a news channel using a few short clips of their footage the issue however is that business casual is actively censoring criticism in the comments of their video after noticing some comments disappearing I set up a script to monitor the comment section and Alex has deleted thousands of comments expressing perfectly Fair criticism and rebuttals things he said in the video I actually later found out Alex even has a block on his own name in his comment section so nobody can post anything about his dark past but for example on his video about suing YouTube a lot of people pointed out that the way Alex's weapon the copyright system is dangerous for creators several argued he was shelling for even more Draconian copyright laws the exact opposite of what most creators want in fact Alex edson's lawyer even argued in court that YouTube should automatically just delete someone's Channel if someone Falls three strikes against them without that user being able to even defend themselves now I later found out Alex edson's own lawyers fired him as a client which shows even the lawyers were skeptical of what Alex was pushing for but to summarize Alex Edson clearly has a history of threatening and filing lawsuits and there's a whole host of allegations about ripping off creators censoring anyone who remotely questions him and false flagging other channels which brings us back to my situation as I now had a pretty big decision to make foreign there are only two ways to resolve a copyright strike number one contact the person who made the strike and ask them to retract it or number two file a counter notification but this is more serious than it sounds a counter notification means you have to fill out an official form with your full legal name address and phone number and this gets sent to the claimant YouTube make it very clear by signing this form you're beginning a legal process and the information you submit can be used to follow lawsuits against you in other words your info goes to the claimants and they may decide whether to sue you now what you might be thinking of course just father counter notifications we're talking about a couple of seconds of footage what Creator would possibly sue someone over there well we know for a fact Alex Edson would he has a history of lawsuits and taking down channels if I'd been dealing with any other Creator I wouldn't have hesitated but these were not normal circumstances the copyright lawyers I spoke with said Alex could be described as a vexatious litigants someone who repeatedly uses the legal system with seemingly malicious intent you see some other creators have discovered that Alex edson's entire business plan right now is filing loads of AI patterns not because he's planning on making anything with the patents but so that if in future someone else vaguely infringes on one of them accidentally when they're making something actually useful Alex can sue them and so basically if I filed a counter notification against the copyright strikes I knew there was a real possibility of getting sued given Alex's history now I'm sure some of you are thinking well what's so bad about that you can win the lawsuit and even countersue him because obviously I've lost a lot of Revenue and momentum on my channel because of what's happened but here's the problem the lawsuit would likely be in New York and I spoke with some New York copyright lawyers and the average price is around a thousand dollars per hour not just that but everyone told me the same thing the legal process is insanely slow a copyright case can literally take multiple years so you're easily looking at hundreds of thousands of dollars of legal fees to defend yourself I realize that sounds insane and believe me I agree but I actually spoke with some creators going through legal battles right now and they all said how time consuming stressful and mentally taxing it is unlike Alex I don't want to spend all my time dealing with legal proceedings I want to make content so for those wondering why I was so against legal action that's why however I'd already repeatedly tried option one of privately contacting Alex and trying to resolve this quietly between the two of us and he'd show no interest so it was either file the counter notification and risk years of legal action or have my channel an entire livelihood deleted so I felt the counter notification but here's the other problem because Alex had deliberately filed three copyright strikes it seemed like if he did file legal action within 10 US business days YouTube would uphold the strikes and my channel would be banned until I resolved them in chords which could take years so at this point I realized I had to go public and share what was happening I really didn't want to I have no interest in being part of Internet drama but this was my livelihood at stake and Alex was still completely ignoring me unfortunately I'd been very naive as pretty much all of my audience was on YouTube where I couldn't post videos because of the strikes so even though I had around 950 000 subscribers I'd not advertised my other social media accounts and I had barely a thousand followers but with no other choice I made a Twitter thread and a community tab post explaining the situation and just had to hope for the best that someone could help and then something quite incredible happened the amount of support I received was genuinely not something I ever expected my Twitter threads explaining the situation went viral thousands of you reached out with kind messages and suggestions and soon many other creators were making videos on what was happening and this just snowballed until some of the biggest creators on the platform were coming out to support me and help get YouTube's attention about what Alex was doing not just that but this opened the floodgates for more allegations about Alex Edson I'm not exaggerating when I tell you a shocking amount of people privately reached out with claims against Alex and in almost all cases they mentioned they'd not spoken out publicly as he'd threatened them with lawsuits or worse but countless people sent me screenshots and proof of ways Alex had in some way ripped them off or lied to them or tried to ruin their life it seems power TV MCN had a lot of victims but here's what's really interesting about this everyone was pretty much saying the same thing to Alex deleting another Creator's Channel over a few seconds of similar footage is crazy just drop the strikes and I'd made it really clear to Alex in my Twitter thread I just wanted to move on from all this and so as an olive branch I even offered to Alex that if in future I ever cover another similar topic to business casual I'd send in my scripts and sources and editing files before putting it live just so he had peace of mind nothing was infringing and so I really hoped he dropped the strikes and we'd all just move on with our lives but he didn't instead Alex Edson began filing false privacy claims against every single Creator who spoke out about the situation just to highlight how insane this is most of these creators had literally just shown the public business casual YouTube channel page something which anyone can see by typing in the words business casual and yet Alex Edson was now false flagging all these videos to try and get their content deleted just because they'd shown a picture of his YouTube channel thankfully at this point because so many people had spoken Out YouTube did not listen to Alex's false complaints and the videos are still up but it's crazy to me that he was still just trying to silence other creators so blatantly and of course he was once again Mass deleting comments that called him out although there were too many comments to to keep up with so he eventually just set it so no new comments show up on his recent videos he also began trying to scrub the internet of some of his history one of the funniest examples of this is the other Echelon screen recorded a community tab post he'd made where Alex claimed he'd donated all the money he won from one of his lawsuits to drop grenades on Russian soldiers except other ejelum found out he'd never received the money from that lawsuit and so Alex's Claim about how much he was donating was likely completely made up but as a professional arm was screen recording this he captured the moment Alex Hudson deleted this post literally showing in real time how Alex was desperately trying to hide evidence of his lies but still even though I had amazing support clearly Alex wasn't backing down as he still didn't drop the strikes so let's talk about the current situation of where things are right now well actually before I get to the latest update I have missed several sponsor deadlines whilst I've been blocked from uploading thankfully though the awesome people over at ship station have stuck with me through all this they've been big supporters of this channel for a while now and just great people to work with and so I want to quickly tell you all about their awesome service and how it can help you shipstation lets you easily compare shipping rates and delivery times and get you access to discounted pricing that's normally only available to huge companies for example you can get up to 84 off USPS and UPS rates shipstation also lets you manage all your online sales from one simple to use dashboard so basically if you sell anything online like for example with Amazon Shopify Etsy or eBay shipstation effortlessly integrates with all of them and makes it much easier to manage everything in other words shipstation literally helps save you both time and money so worry less about the bottom line when you save money with ship station go to shipstation.com magnates and sign up for your free 60-day trial today that's shiftstation.com magnates for two months completely free Alex Edson had 10 days to follow lawsuits and he hasn't so I'm pleased to say it's very good news magnate's media lives on and is not being deleted however the situation definitely isn't perfect Alex still hasn't dropped the strikes one has now been removed by YouTube which means I can post videos as normal again but two strikes are still remaining and I'll need to re-upload those videos he took down the more annoying thing though is that this whole incident has definitely caused a lot of lost Revenue a lot of stress a lot of issues with projects that were in place and it's also killed the momentum of some of my videos especially the Carnegie video which had taken months to make and I was really proud of but hey compared to losing everything which looked like a real possibility at one point this is an absolutely huge win and even though this has been a nightmare I've connected with so many amazing creators as a result of this so that's definitely a nice Silver Lining but I really want to take a minute just to say thank you I know some people were praising YouTube for saving my channel but even though I love YouTube to be honest it wasn't YouTube the credit goes to the YouTube Community the amount of support I received was genuinely incred edible and I can't really put into words how grateful I am to every single one of you who sent messages or tagged to other creators to get the word out it was because of you that this story got on the radar of bigger creators and I really believe it was because of all the attention this got but Alex back down from his lawsuit threads the way the community rallied behind me on this was amazing so to every single one of you who shared this or helped in any way I seriously can't thank you enough I'm not exaggerating when I say the YouTube Community saved my channel because until all this went viral YouTuber just given a generic response about what copyright strikes are and look I totally get it YouTube don't like to get involved in copyright disputes especially when Alex Edson is literally trying to sue YouTube as well but thanks to all the attention this got YouTube is now actively looking into this and hopefully we'll put more protection in place to stop this kind of thing happening to anyone again I also want to say a huge thanks to every Creator who made videos about this so many awesome channels that I'm a fan of myself posted about this which was surreal like Ludwig penguin zero Scott Schaefer some ordinary gamers Marky spat sensitive Society airs as when gold pyro Alana and literally so many more I especially want to thank upper echelon who had seen through Alex edson's lies long before anyone else had made public videos about him honestly upper echelon's thorough research is brilliant and I'll link to his videos at the end of this if you want a more in-depth look at the evidence against Alex but I also want to thank all the creators who helped out in some way or gave me advice like James Janney Moon Charlie Hooper Spencer Cornelia and so many of you who are kind enough to help and give recommendations and also thanks as well for the memes which provided some humor in what was a pretty dark time but finally thank you to you right now watching this without your support I would not be here right now so seriously it does mean a lot I'm lucky that I had this level of support because some of the creators Alex Edson targeted in the past didn't have this kind of visibility unless they got silenced honestly I could make an hour-long documentary going through all the allegations people have sent me about Alex and I know there are some bigger creators who've got the evidence as well who want to make videos about it as it's pretty wild but as far as I'm concerned as long as Alex doesn't come out to my channel again or any other creators I now want to draw a line under all of this and just move on obviously if Alex does pursue legal action or more strikes I'll be documenting it every step of the way and I'll not only be fighting it but I'll be doing what many of you kindly suggested which is a GoFundMe so we can counter sue for all the damages and then use that money as a protection fund for other creators in the future but my hope is that this is now the end of it and I can simply go back to making videos for you all whilst this has been very stressful and caused a lot of problems overall this seems like a huge win not just for my channel but for creators in general and it really just shows the power of the YouTube community that says that this incident has made me realize relying solely on YouTube is not a wise move so if you'd like to follow me at magnates media on Twitter and Instagram I'm going to try to post more there as well from now on but to summarize my Andrew Carnegie video is back up which you can watch here my channel seems to be okay again and I should hopefully have some new uploads for you very soon seriously thank you once again for your support I'll see you next time cheers

Channel: MagnatesMedia

Views: 566,505

Keywords: Alex Edson, Business Casual, Alex edson business casual, alex edson copyright, what happened to magnatesmedia, magnatesmedia update, magnates media copyright strikes

Id: aJLdLb9dwAY

Length: 25min 19sec (1519 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 01 2023