Removing Stolen Stories From Youtube

Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer, and nothing I write below is intended as legal advice. The steps presented here are accurate as of July 23, 2024, but may have changed by the time you read it.

So, your story's been stolen from Literotica and posted to YouTube. What now?

Well, you could ignore it. A lot of people do. The channels that do this count on writers not responding, and it's worked pretty well for them so far. The process in place for fighting theft on YouTube can seem like it's on their side, too, especially if you're not familiar with the content-creation side over there.

Hell, some of you might even be saying, "Why should I care about this? It doesn't affect me." If you're not planning to monetize your works, that might even be true. However, if you are, it can create a problem down the road, especially if you get a publisher that wants all your works on free sites taken down before they'll put your stuff out. It can also cause problems if you decide that you'd like to have audio versions of your stories made; the guys with the YouTube channels could pursue a copyright claim on you instead.

However, let's say you're not interested in making money from your writing. You're anonymous, you have no aspirations to publish professionally, and you just want your stories out there for as many people to experience as possible. In that case, maybe someone repackaging them doesn't sound so bad.

It is bad, though. My God, is it bad.

First, the guys that run these channels bowdlerize the hell out of the stories to get them past YouTube's censors. Did someone die in your story? No, they didn't. They "unalived" instead. Got some big black cocks in your tale? Sorry, you've got "large dark Johnsons" now. Characters don't "fuck" anymore; they "enjoy." You get the idea.

And that's just the editing to get around the filters! After that, there are the words whose pronunciation is too ambiguous for the text-to-speech software to navigate. Most of these channels come from places where English is, at best, a second language, and rather than tinker with a word's spelling to make it more phonetic, the channel owners will open up a thesaurus and shove in the first match; usually, it's laughably wrong. For example, in one of my stories, "sexy but not sleazy" got replaced with "sexy but not cloying," because some TTS software pronounces "sleazy" as "slay-ah-zee."

Worse, because they use text-to-speech programs instead of voice actors, the delivery is completely off. If you're thinking, "I've always wanted an audiobook of my story," trust me: not like this, you don't. Flat pronunciation and weird emphasis are the order of the day, and every single character has the same voice. If you're not liberal with your dialog tags-and sometimes even if you are-figuring out who's speaking at any given point becomes impossible in exchanges between more than two characters.

Even if you want your stories out there for as many people as possible, this isn't the way to do it. They aren't your stories anymore. Instead, they're weird, off-brand, dollar store knockoffs. If you love the things you've written? Don't let this happen to them. Once these channels get their hands on your works, they'll butcher every last one.

We can stop them from doing that, though, if we work together.

With enough copyright strikes-three strikes in a ninety-day period-a channel gets banned. The guys running the channels know this, and they do everything they can to avoid it. You know, short of not stealing content. For example, previously, they'd mostly stick to ripping off stories from writers who hadn't been active in a long time, often a decade or more. More recently, however, they've started aggressively targeting active writers, myself included.

Bad choice, brother.

I've already killed one of the smaller channels, although I don't know if that's single-handedly or because other folks hit it with copyright strikes, too. Either way, I reported the stories they'd stolen about six months ago, and they haven't shown up on any other channels, either. YouTube's algorithm is supposed to catch the audio and flag it when someone tries to upload it again. As far as I can tell, it's worked in my case.

Since it's about time for another go-round, I thought I'd document the process. Maybe if enough of us hit them with takedown requests, we can make it so expensive that the thieves close up shop entirely. Probably not, but hope springs eternal, right?

That's the key: we need to make running these channels expensive. The whole point of their racket is to minimize costs using underhanded tactics in order to extract the most profit. Stealing stories, using text-to-speech programs instead of voice actors, and running the audio over stock footage or videogame clips means they can keep their costs low.

Whenever we cost them subscribers or time, we cut into their profits. If their channel gets shut down, they lose subscribers and therefore money. If they have to create a new channel, it costs them time and therefore money. If they have to find new sources of content, it costs them money. If they have to generate new videos, it costs them money.

If we make it unprofitable, they lose. So, let's do that.

First things first. You're going to need a YouTube account, which is basically just a Gmail account by another name. If you don't have a Gmail address with your nom de plume attached to it, this is as good a reason as any to make one. Start there and make sure you're logged into it on YouTube. If the icon in the upper right corner of the YouTube page is either your profile image or your initials, you're golden.

Next, you have to find things to report. If you don't know for sure that your content's been stolen... Well, if you're posting relationship drama stories in Loving Wives, it probably has. Even if you're not, though, it still might have been. Some of these channels have grabbed stories of mine from Romance, Mature, Sci-Fi, and more. A lot of these guys run multiple channels, each with their own content focus, so not posting stories about folks cheating is no protection.

The easiest way to find out if your content has been stolen is to run a set of simple searches in YouTube's search function. I'd suggest doing these in a web browser you don't normally use (Firefox, Chrome, Edge, and Safari are all readily available) to keep from tainting your usual video suggestions. The searches will be different for each writer, here are some of the ones I've used (include the double quotes but change the text in them where appropriate):

cheating stories notalenthack

cheating stories "your story name here"

cheating stories "names of characters in your story"

cheating stories "short but memorable quote from your story"

notalenthack stories

sci fi stories notalenthack

romance stories notalenthack

You can add plus signs to make sure that the search has to return only results with the specific text, too. For example:

cheating stories "+in +health"

Should only return entries that are related to cheating stories and which have both "in" and "health" specifically (so, not "healthy" or "healthful") in their description.

I'll be honest: the first two searches netted me the most results, and it may be the same for you. These guys are lazy, but they also often want to have a sheen of respectability, so they'll often put something in the description of the video giving credit to the writer and/or naming the story, saying their audio is "inspired by" it.

Some sample results from these initial searches (I've redacted the images, because Laurel helpfully pointed out that Literotica could receive a DMCA takedown request for this how-to if one of the channels was feeling petty. Oh, the irony!):

Hilariously, all of these are my stories, but only one of them, the middle one, had a thumbnail that was even slightly correct. The top one was actually a copy of a thumbnail from another video the channel had posted that didn't have anything in common with my story at all. Like I said, lazy.

If you want to go for the gold, look at the page of the channel that uploaded each video you find. On those pages, you'll find a separate search box that will specifically return results only from that channel.

I've found a number of additional stories using this technique. For whatever reason, YouTube's main search sometimes skips results, so searching channels where you know someone's already stolen your stuff is a good way to counteract that problem. Hell, search for your friends' stuff, too. Like I said, this is a group effort. Bury them under copyright strikes, y'all.

As you find stories, open up tabs in your browser of choice for each of them. You're going to want the URLs later, since it's easier to mass-report rather than do it one at a time, and having them open will give you an easy reference when you're entering takedown requests.

This is my third time through the process, so I had to dig a little bit more for hits, but I still got a pretty decent haul:

Now, on to the intimidating part. It's actually very easy once you know what to do, but there's a lot that YouTube doesn't adequately explain in the process unless you're willing to dig for answers.

Luckily for you, I've already done that.

First, go to

https://studio.youtube.com

. This is a hub primarily for YouTube content creators, but also where people can go to lodge copyright complaints.

Once there, click on "Copyright" in the menu on the left-hand side, then "Removal Requests" on the screen that appears.

In the upper right-hand corner of this screen is a button that reads "New Removal Request." Click it. A new screen will appear that looks something like this:

Click "Add a video" and fill out the requested information for the first video, selecting "Written work," "Book," and "Entire Video" in the appropriate fields. Enter the title of the story as it appears on Literotica. Lastly, in the field "Infringing Video," paste in the URL of the video. Then, click "Add to list."

Repeat this process until all the videos you want to flag have been added.

Next, fill out the section entitled "Copyright Owner." I won't show a screenshot of this, as it includes personally identifiable information, but I've used the same information for each set of copyright strikes I've lodged. Also, the required information may vary based on the country you live in. For "Copyright owner name," you can use your Literotica handle. In "Relationship to copyrighted content," I wrote, "I am the writer and owner of copyright on all these stories."

IMPORTANT:

The next section is titled "Removal options." MAKE SURE YOU SELECT "Standard: Request removal now." This is how you can create a copyright strike. If you select the other option, the channel that uploaded the video will get a chance to remove the video instead of catching a strike. We don't want that.

Also, check "Prevent future copies of this content from appearing on YouTube," and the second checkbox that shows up afterwards. If you change your mind about this after the strike goes through-for example, if you partner with someone who creates audio content-it can be toggled back off on the YouTube Studio Copyright dashboard.

At the bottom, check all checkboxes and put in your legal name. You could put in something else, I assume, as long as it's not obviously fake. Let's be honest, though: it's Google. They already have your name. We can pretend otherwise, but you know it's true. According to the disclaimers on the page, the name you sign with won't be exposed unless lawyers get involved. This is the last thing these thieving assholes want, so don't sweat it.

Once all that's done, click "Submit" at the top of the screen, confirm you're not a robot, and wait. Your YouTube Studio Removal Requests screen should now look something like this:

After a while-usually only a few minutes, but sometimes as long as a couple of days-you should receive an email from an account named YouTube Copyright confirming the request(s).

From there, a few different things could happen. Most likely, if this is your first run through the system, another email will come in sometime in the next few days asking for additional information:

When you receive something like this, all you need to do is answer the questions asked by replying to the email, like so:

I wrote the story "I Know My Wife" and am the copyright holder. It was first published on November 19, 2022 at

https://literotica.com/s/i-know-my-wife

The video I reported uses, as its audio track, a copy of the story run through a text-to-speech program.

Now here's the fun part: the channels in question will get a chance to reach out to you through email before the process finishes. They will beg. Oh, how they will beg. "I really enjoy your work, which is why I stole it," or "I didn't know it was wrong to use this without permission," or... whatever. It's all bullshit. They know it is. Every single one of them knows it is. They're trying to play on your sympathies and your ego to let them get away with it. Don't fall for it.

I made the mistake the first time around of letting one of these guys off, not due to any sympathy, but because I didn't want to deal with the possibility of having to go through a whole legal thing. He pulled the video, but within a few days it had been posted to another channel, all with the same TTS voice and video background. Then another one popped up a couple more days later with the same story but a different voice on a third channel. If you let them off the hook for any reason at all, they'll come back for more. Seriously, fuck these guys.

The second time I did a round of strikes, they begged again, but I let it ride. Those videos haven't shown back up since, nor have alternate versions with a different TTS voice. YouTube's submission algorithm has apparently been doing its job.

My third attempt, the one I've documented in this how-to, didn't require any reply to the YouTube Copyright email account. I don't know if YouTube has gotten more aggressive in the last six months or if maybe I'm on some sort of whitelist for having lodged successful complaints before. Could be a different reason entirely; it's Google, so who knows? Regardless, this morning, the day after I lodged my removal requests, I woke up to a whole new bunch of heads on my trophy wall.

The channels involved in the latest wave are still up as of this writing. It takes three copyright strikes in ninety days for YouTube to ban a channel entirely, and the owner of the channel has seven days to appeal their ban, so that's not necessarily indicative. After the guys that own these channels eat a copyright strike from a specific writer, they'll tend to avoid them afterwards; I expect that even if these guys set up shop elsewhere, they'll give future stories of mine a wide berth. And, of course, YouTube's upload filter is now looking for the text of the ones I've reported.

Could one of these guys get their videos reinstated? Possibly. There's a process whereby they can claim that they have the right to post the video due to fair use or some other nonsense. If they do that, though, they have to agree to share either their personal info (name, address, phone, etc.) or their legal representative's info; they, on the other hand, won't get my info unless I file a legal claim against them.

I have never, not once, heard of one of these channels responding in this way. I'm not saying that they couldn't, but even if they do, all you have to do is relinquish the claim. Doing so doesn't prevent you from making another one later if you change your mind. Even if you do that, though, you've still cost them time and money, especially if they had to get their lawyer involved.

One aspect of this particular wave of removals warms my little black heart. Three stories came from a specific channel named "Slake Blake." They have stories on there from damned near every Loving Wives author I can think of, and I'm pretty sure from some other folks, too. These are the channel's numbers as of this morning:

If these three copyright strikes get it banned, which YouTube's rules explicitly say they should, the owner of the channel loses all of that: the channel, the subscribers, the uploaded videos, the reliable revenue stream, all of it. A year and a half of effort, gone. Sure, they can open up a new channel with different credentials, but they need to drip-feed videos in order to build engagement, because that's the way the algorithm works.

They lose name recognition, too. On a separate computer, I VPNed into a different network, downloaded a new browser, made sure it wasn't logged into a Google account, and entered "slak" in the search box. It showed up twice in the autocomplete, with the top entry as "slake blake" and the fifth one down as "slake blake stories."

One pissed off writer, three separate strikes, and *poof*! All gone.

The smarter channels know this, too; a number of the channels have only one or two stories from each writer, no matter how prolific that author might be. They're gaming YouTube's rules, because each strike has a 90-day cooling off period. If they space them out, they might lose the revenue of specific videos, but not their entire channel.

Now, imagine if, say, five of the people reading this how-to follow its instructions in the week after it's published. Imagine if we all did. Even if YouTube chooses to ignore its rules and not ban the channels, removing a big chunk of their existing videos and denying them future content-because they will avoid writers that landed copyright strikes-costs them money. Cost them enough, and their scam ceases to be profitable.

I know other authors in the past have had difficulties reporting channels for stealing their content. The whole process can be frustrating, confusing, and demoralizing. It doesn't have to be, though. If enough of us report these guys, we can drive them back to scraping "true" stories off of social media or making shitty, nonsensical AI-generated content. Or maybe even *gasp* getting a real job.