The entire episode is worth a watch based on Sterling’s well-reasoned arguments. But the thing that really sets it apart is a revelation near the end of the video, where Sterling explains why he makes such ample use of footage that is completely unrelated to what he actually discusses throughout the video.

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“You may have noticed this week’s video had footage from Metal Gear Solid V, Grand Theft Auto V, and Beyond: Two Souls in it,” Sterling said. “Now, there’s a reason for that. The reason is Nintendo. Because I’m talking about a Nintendo game this week, I’ve used Nintendo game footage, and that means Nintendo will attempt to monetize this video even though the point of the Jimquisition is to be ad-free, thanks to your lovely help on Patreon.

So, Jim Sterling hatched a plan. He went back through his older videos, and took note of what footage got slammed with a Content ID claim in the past. He then went ahead and copied that same flagged footage, and stuck it into his new video. The self-sabotage was intentional: Sterling wanted to fuck with the Content ID system.

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“I figured every time I talk about Nintendo, I’m going to throw in other stuff that gets flagged by Content ID, and just watch the corporations battle it out,” Sterling said. His hope was that by pulling this stunt, he could stop any company from monetizing the video at all, since it wouldn’t be clear who really owned the footage in the first place. And if anybody did manage to monetize the video, they’d probably only get peanuts for it.

The scheme panned out just the way he thought it would, Jim Sterling tells Kotaku.

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I can confirm it works,” Jim Sterling said over email. “It’s worked several times before. WMG tried to monetize the video for the Erasure music, but couldn’t because Nintendo and Take-Two had set their ContentID in this particular case to Not Monetized.”

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“I discovered this by accident a few months back when competing claims from Sony and Konami meant no ads ended up running on my video. Pretty good workaround for someone trying to keep my series ad-free, even if it means you have to actively try and ‘infringe copyright’ to exercise your fair use rights.”

Ha. Way to be clever, Jim Sterling. But here’s hoping that one day, YouTube’s copyright system isn’t so bad that it necessitates ridiculous workarounds like this one. One can dream, eh?

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