Thread by @wendoverpro

Many of you have reached out and asked why our latest video (How Cyberwarfare Actually Works) is now unavailable due to copyright claim. For those interested, a thread:

TLDR - It's a classic copyright abuse situation with some nuance.

Roughly 75 seconds of this video cover the story of iDefense--an early Cybersecurity company that found itself intwined in the foundation of the zero-day (software vulnerability) market

The story of iDefense was first covered in detail by @nicoleperlroth in her book "This is How They Tell Me the World Ends." As we often do, we read multiple books about our subject to give us a broad, background understanding of the topic. In this case, one of them was this book

The story of iDefense provided unique specifics into a topic that often can only be talked about in a broad, abstract manner, so we decided to include it in our video.

Since we sourced much (but not all) of the information for this section from Perlroth's book, we included it in our references section, and even went further to show the cover of the book in the video itself.

However, shortly after the video was released, Nicole Perlroth published a now-deleted tweet accusing us of plagiarizing her book. I (Sam) DM'd her and we started a discussion there.

In that, she accused us of copying her book word-for-word. Despite being asked directly multiple times, she has yet to indicate which words were directly copied. I ran our script through three plagiarism checkers, checked manually, and know since I wrote the section...

No words were copied. Simply, objectively, there is no plagiarism of the book. Our use of it was as a source of information--the same way we use articles, Wikipedia pages, news reports, videos, interviews, etc to find the information to craft our narratives.

After continuing our discussion, Nicole Perlroth seemed to understand the baseless nature of her accusation, and I agreed, as a gesture of goodwill, to include a direct endorsement of the book with a link to its sale page in the most prominent spot possible (under the sponsor.)

I have nothing but respect and admiration for Perlroth and her work. She's a fantastic writer who conducted groundbreaking research into a shadowy world at great personal peril, and crafted it into an excellent story.

However, you can't own facts. Once she published her book, this information entered a public forum, and therefore reuse of that information is fair game--especially when properly attributed.

If this wasn't the case, not a single non-fiction creator could exist. We all research topics, using primary and secondary sources, and craft them into consumable narratives. That's what you do to make a YouTube video, a book, a documentary, etc. That's our job.

Even if you could own facts, our use constitutes fair use. It is transformative in nature and has no negative effect on the market for the original work. In fact, this is the very use fair use was designed to protect.

To be clear, plagiarism on the internet is a massive issue. We see it all the time with content farms and massive media companies copying our videos, but this simply is not plagiarism. This is research and writing.

The methods of how to source information is a matter of ethics, not law. To avoid sourcing too much information from one place, we purposefully sourced information on other subjects covered in both our video and this book (like Stuxnet) from sources other than Perlroth's book.

Therefore, the copyright strike that Perlroth's publishers issued, on her request, is baseless and represents copyright abuse.

I can understand feeling like you hold a special right to information that you painstakingly worked to bring to a wider audience--I've felt that repeatedly--but that feeling is not backed up by ethics or the law. Once information enters a public forum, it's public.

This seems to be yet another case of the law not being on a big company's side, but them abusing the system to still get a portion of what they want. Especially since this is a new video, waiting the ten days for our counter-notification to be processed has a financial impact.

YouTubers aren't hobbyists anymore. I've built a team of a dozen people whose salaries are paid using this income. We have insurance payments, lease payments, legal expenses, etc--we're a legitimate company whose finances shouldn't be able to be impacted by cyberbullying

I'd hope Nicole Perlroth and her publishers are simply misinformed on the legal grounds of her claim. I can't imagine she purposefully would engage in copyright abuse. But her actions represent a threat to digital creation--something that I'd hope is antithetical to her values.

If this tweet is still up, the videos's still down. Every minute the video's down means we're being financially punished for actions that do not violate ethics or the law because of Perlroth taking advantage of a flawed, exploitative copyright notification system.