I received a copyright takedown and strike to my YouTube channel on Mon, Apr 1, 2019, 8:43 AM.
In response to my Twitter Post, Thor would claim that his strike was to prevent me, a “scammer”, from profiting off of his work.
“As someone scamming us out of our income I fight you into the ground to prevent you from making a single cent off of our work.”
Thor employs an “us vs them” narrative, where he portrays himself as the victim of a scammer, and me as a villain who is trying to profit off of his work. Thor small good guy, Lyric big bad guy.
While his narrative would prove to be effective, the premise that I even made any money off of his work was unfounded. While it tends to be broadly accepted that YouTubers make money off of videos, I turned off monetization on my videos related to Heartbound, by his own request.
Thor reached out to me about 24 hours after I published my first Heartbound video.
We never reached a licensing agreement. After I followed up with my request for a license, I would give Thor advice on YouTube’s CMS system.
In a screenshot I sent to Thor in our Discord DMs showing him “content usage policy”, it shows that I had monetization turned off.
Despite the fact that he did not permit my videos to be monetized, Thor would encourage me to make more content with his music.
Following this, I would arrange at least 20 songs from Heartbound for Thor, though only 3 were published due to my release schedule.
I believe wanting more content is generally a normal thing for a game developer to want.
However, it should be noted that Thor went out of his way to ensure that I was not monetizing my videos, while encouraging me to make more content for him (which is essentially free publicity for him).
This is all while he places financial pressure on me to donate to his projects like his Kickstarter.
And after he got the free publicity, he would weaponize my content by submitting a copyright strike against my channel while publicly claiming that I was “scamming” him.