The Problem of Mainland Chinese Self-Media Videos Illegally Flowing into YouTube

Over the past few months, on the YouTube platform, I’ve gradually developed a habit of regularly following and watching a mainland Chinese video blogger surnamed Liu, who films videos of himself cycling in Tibet—it’s a bit of comfort for the frustration of not being able to travel abroad for several years.

In a video last month, this documentarian suddenly weakly condemned the videos on overseas platforms as all being illegal re-uploads. Only then did I realize that the channel I was watching was what he called an illegal re-uploader 🤣, and upon checking, its subscriber count had already broken 70,000!

That pirated channel even wrote in its description: “There are too many pirated copies, which troubles me a lot. Please help me report the pirated ones if you find them, or leave a comment here to tell me. Thank you!”

Does this mean too many people are competing for the business? So I casually reported it—after all, he said so himself. 🤣

Just now, when YouTube was auto-playing videos, it again proactively recommended a latest video from this blogger, the content of which was likewise weakly condemning illegal re-uploading, which caught my attention. Only this time, he said he had officially established an authorized channel on YouTube.

I initially thought it was probably the pirate making another blunder, even stealing the person’s clarification video. But after checking, it turned out the system had proactively recommended his legitimate channel’s video, which currently has nearly 10,000 subscribers—I don’t know if this is a compensation mechanism YouTube proactively provides.

But going back to look at the previous illegal re-upload channel, its subscriber count is still over 70,000, seemingly having received no punishment at all. I don’t know how YouTube will handle this matter later.

From what can currently be observed, that channel hasn’t uploaded a new video for three days, which is very likely because the channel owner’s account has been suspended.

Based on my understanding of Google’s advertising policy, the portion the pirate has already converted to cash, Google won’t pursue; it will only freeze the remaining amount in the ad backend, or even just close the revenue account.

As for the victim wanting to pursue compensation, they could hire a lawyer to handle it. I believe that with 70,000 followers and each video having hundreds of thousands of views, the amount of infringement that can be pursued should not be low.

But judging from my observation of this blogger’s personality, it’s probably very difficult—otherwise I wouldn’t have mentioned “weakly” twice earlier.

Finally, I want to say that a very interesting reflection can be observed here.

Mainland Chinese video bloggers’ videos are pirated and uploaded to YouTube, forcing those bloggers to find ways to climb over the wall to protect their legitimate intellectual property rights. This seems to be somewhat the reverse of a few years ago, when mainland Chinese people stole outside creative content into the mainland.

Well, it’s just that you can’t be sure where those pirates are actually from.