David Pakman: The YOU in YouTube
While browsing today, I was surprised to learn that YouTuber and talk show host, David Pakman, has come within a hair of being completely kicked off of YouTube. The reason? Fox News filed two strikes against his channel, the most recent being for his use of their coverage of the Republican primary debates. Pakman addresses it himself in this video.
Pakman, like lot of news YouTubers, will provide his own commentary over live events (such as presidential debates) and will stream it on his own channel as he provides said commentary. While he believes this falls under fair use, Fox News nevertheless filed a copyright strike against him. This brought him up to two at once, with a third being grounds for the suspension of his entire YouTube channel and effectively his business. As Pakman put it:
If we get one more, the channel will be shut down, and at that point, I genuinely don’t know what happens.
As some might opine, providing commentary, live or otherwise, of a broadcast is pretty normal for YouTube. In fact, it’s what many specifically seek out, who otherwise would have no intention of watching the broadcast as is. Many are probably also thinking that this is rarely enforced because companies agree that fair use applies or realize that their bottom line (which is the point of copyright protection) isn’t affected by a YouTuber’s commentary.
Mainstreams news outlets use their competitions’ footage all the time. ABC regularly shows what happened on NBC that week and plays the clip. Famous comedy programs like the The Daily Show, The Soup, or Tosh.O, depended on their ability to do this.
Beyond that, there is a deeper issue here. It’s the encroachment of big businesses into the domain of the little guy. It’s called YouTube for a reason. Founded in 2005, before its acquisition by Google, it represented a transition from the dial-up age of flash cartoons on Newgrounds.com to the more widely accessible norm of broadband Internet today. The ability of any user to upload anything and go viral was a new thing. It was television made possible by you and not by bloated media tycoons.
The paradigm shift was stark enough that it influenced Time magazine’s decision to name 2006 Person of the Year as You. Yes, it was a silly decision, and I thought so at the time, but the fact that it happened shows what was going on. Just before this shift, in 2004, Pixar released The Incredibles, a movie about a family born with superpowers and a villain who aspires to make ordinary humans super with technology. Then in 2007, they released Ratatoille, a film where a wild rat defies the odds and becomes a five-star chef in Paris, whose message is bluntly stated:
Anyone can cook.
Perhaps the timing is coincidental, but it happened. Look at all the cooking content on TikTok and Instagram, often with music from this film in the background. While Google did acquire YouTube in 2006, this implies that they were buying into this user-driven relationship. Seventeen years later, they have not dared to drop the “You” in YouTube. It is still a major platform for the everyman who wants to strike it big with novel content that the mainstream doesn’t have the guts to produce.
While some have lamented that Pakman is too calm and stoic in his coverage of news events, his fans love it. While he openly has partisan allegiances, he offers a much more dispassionate approach that balances against overreactions that dominate the mainstream media.
It’s important to remember that any of us could be Pakman. While it no longer seems to be on his main channel, his earliest appearances on YouTube were not as a talk show host but as a musician and drummer, as this video shows.
He’s some guy who found something that worked, in an era that finally allows some guy to find a proper calling. There is something special in what Pakman has done for himself.
To have an Intellectual Dark Web is to keep the You in YouTube, to stand against forces that whould undo this paradigm shift for the commons. While Google has rights as the parent company to enforce its platform as it sees fit, it doesn’t hurt to remind them what the true value of this platform is. It’s not to be gamed by big corporations (who have legal teams and large, financial resources) at the expense of smaller users. Might as well close shop, liquidate the entire YouTube operation, and issue a special dividend to holders of Alphabet, Inc. if that is the case.
We hope that YouTube can enforce its policies without betraying its roots, roots that are still preserved in its name. Whether or not you are a fan of Pakman, this is an issue worth monitoring closely, and we will continue to do so, with fingers crossed, here at the IDW Community.