![]() ![]() If you're not a huge corporation with tons of money and an army of lawyers, creating original work on the internet often leads to people ripping off that work. I was a 22-year-old kid with no experience in the industry, no understanding of how I should be adequately paid and in some cases I believed bigger YouTubers who said they 'couldn’t afford to pay me.'" "I saw all these adaptations of my work and once the glamour of 'exposure' faded and I saw it was not a neon sign but instead a paltry promise with nothing behind it, I felt powerless to stop it all from happening. "I will tell you straight up that for several years it killed my love of writing," Lea continued. Lea has watched people on YouTube and elsewhere steal his work without credit since 2012, when he wrote a short story called " The Expressionless" which went viral. "That would be a conservative estimate," he said. "Sometimes it’s a story we’ve already run on the podcast, and may want to do something else with in future, so having random Youtubers adapt it without permission makes that harder too."Īuthor T-Jay Lea, whose first book comes out August 31, said that he estimates that he's lost $10-30,000 in revenue. "People taking and adapting my work from r/nosleep means they’re literally reproducing something that someone else holds the audio rights to," White said. The No Sleep podcast, which pays authors for the right to reproduce their work, now also has to compete with YouTubers with much larger audiences than them. Olivia White, who is an author on No Sleep and also works for the unaffiliated No Sleep podcast, said that this theft has affected her in multiple ways. "Some authors have nearly lost paying gigs because of it, others have stopped posting to r/nosleep and/or removed their stories from the subreddit completely because they were so tired of seeing their work stolen," Druga said. Motherboard reached out to Mini Ladd regarding this incident but have not yet received a response.ĭruga claims that, for the authors that have their work read on YouTube, the damage can range from mild annoyance to loss of livelihood. Unfortunately, the damage that had absolutely rocked the community had already been done," Druga said. "Mini Ladd wound up posting a public apology and contacting the affected authors to resolve the issue, and his channel was saved. With his channel under threat, Mini Ladd's fans rallied to his defense, and Durga said that No Sleep authors ended up being harassed, claiming one of them was doxed. After 4 months of attempting to contact him to resolve the issue, a handful of the affected authors filed DMCA strikes against the videos, and his channel was scheduled for deletion," Druga said. "The Youtuber Mini Ladd, who has over 5 million subscribers, had read several r/nosleep stories on his channel without permission. Nothing has worked, and the issue has come to a head this month. Between then and now, several other communities have been created to both educate writers about their rights and teach YouTubers about copyright. Two years ago, Druga said that they created a subreddit to help foster a positive relationship between authors and the people who would like to narrate their work in YouTube videos. "So we, the mods of r/nosleep, have decided to take a stand in support of our authors and the projects that have been created to fight on their behalf."Ĭhristine Druga, one of No Sleep's mods, said over email that this problem has spanned years. ![]() There are still authors who aren’t aware that they have rights in regards to what is done with their stories once they are posted," the mods said in their collective statement about the closure. There are still fans of those channels and pages who are either ignorant of copyright laws in regards to posting written work to the internet or refuse to believe that those laws exist. "There are still people sharing and narrating r/nosleep stories without permission. ![]()
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