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It could have been worse when I had my YouTube account penalized for violations and am now suspended from both setting unlisted videos and no longer can host videos 15 minutes and longer until the penalty is lifted in July. It all started with a poor decision on my part that spiraled out of control when I failed to act in a timely matter as I considered making a decision.
I was in the market to bring more game play video to the Dragon Blogger YouTube channel, and had an offer to hire some freelance people to play and record themselves playing game play footage for our channel. This was innocent, you simply record the play of the game you are playing and enjoying anyway in a series for the channel on that game. As a sample to see how their recordings turn out, they could get a new game I would buy if they covered some game footage of games they already had first.
It worked out sort of at first, I got some game footage and some limited view interest and increase, but when one person I hired offered early access footage from the World of Warships game that he was part of the Alpha too I thought an Alpha would get some notice so I accepted some vids and uploaded them to the channel.
I failed take note that the game was under a non-disclosure agreement but a comment was left after the videos had started really reaching combinations of thousands of views and I was trying to dig up information on how an NDA applies to leaked information when my properties and myself didn’t actually sign an NDA we just received the game footage. In the end I had made the decision to take down the content and immediately marked it all for deletion on my YouTube channel less than 1 week after it was hosted.
By that time it was too late, claims had been filed and went through after the vids were already deleted and slapped the penalties on the channel. This was a lesson learned, in an effort to try and host early or first access content I had stepped into something without thinking of the consequences. As a result being in a race to be the first to publish anything about any game isn’t something to really seek after anymore, a small site has very little chance to legally get early access to content as game developers provide snapshots and vids and access (with permission to share) only to the bigger companies. Fortunately most games that go Beta aren’t under NDA like Alpha versions are, but be very careful when reading those NDA’s that you sign when doing any gaming, some NDA’s will forbid you from Twitch streaming, recording, uploading or even taking screenshots to put in a blog post or forum.
Lesson learned.
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