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Comment by nixcraft | Hacker News Reader

Meanwhile, Google has removed RedFrost Motivation[1] (over 1.5 million subs and =>120 million views) from the YouTube Partner program stating reason "uses someone else's content without adding significant value for viewers". I kid you not. This is one of my favourite motivational channels with an orignal artistic take. According to post[1], they claim to use talented voice artists and musicians to produce our exclusive poetry readings and narrated quote collections. Their appeal is rejected and ignored by YouTube[2]. So one must wonder why Google allows spam but closes down real content creators?

[1] https://www.youtube.com/post/UgkxqHIIcsQM91HSVme5jE5PlYQp6Zk...

[2] https://twitter.com/RedFrost_m/status/1526561792243138560

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The ban seems legitimate since they use copyrighted poems.

Every answer on StackOverflow is under Creative Commons SA-BY, and this guy follows exactly the terms of the license.

I won't say that this Youtube channel isn't a parasite, but it's doing something 100% legally and the one you talk about is not.

The posted explanation doesn't mention copyright, though. It complains that the channel was delivering the content without "adding significant value," but meanwhile Google allows this asshole to perpetrate the same offense MILLIONS of times.

I haven't watched any of these videos, but to get away with using a copyright poem or other content as part of a video (to be fair use) the video would need to add something enough that they would stand if they didn't include the copyright content (artistic, discussion, criticism, humour etc) - I'm guessing in this case that YouTube has decided the poems are too large a part of the videos (Probably one or more of the poem copyright holders has lodged a copyright violation against some of them) and the content creator isn't added significant value to content owned by others.

I am not someone who spends much time on YouTube at all, perhaps a few hours a year. But after looking at that channel it just seems to be some line drawn images with a poem read in the background. If it’s not autogenerated content, I bet it absolutely could be by someone on HN.

Comparatively, a suggested video came up below when I was checking out the red frost channel, and I ended up watching most of it. Some guy restoring a vintage mechanical watch from start to finish, which seemed to be (to me) high quality content. The person seemed to know a ton about watch movements and I learned a lot.

Not saying the red frost channel should be banned or anything, but imo it’s not too different than the guy auto posting stack overflow questions and answers, just replace stack overflow with poetry.

> I am not someone who spends much time on YouTube at all, perhaps a few hours a year

In other words, "the bad man can't hurt me if the bad man is outside my field of vision."

This is super dismissive of both the hard work put into the content and the people that want to listen to poetry, short stories and even entire books.

Voice acting is difficult and expensive work, and this person is putting out narrations of anything from Sun Tsu's Art of War to Hercules: The Twelve Labours, along with illustrated narrations of short stories and poems for free.

If people will pay five pounds for a copy of the very hungry caterpillar, there is value in this work. Don't dismiss it just because you don't understand it or like it.

> They use talented voice artists and musicians to produce our exclusive poetry readings and narrated quote collections

... are you telling us you're affiliated with RedFrost Motivation?

No. I am not affiliated with them. But, I have been following them for a long time, and I enjoy poem readings and content created by them. That quote is from their YouTube post. Sorry about the confusion.

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