On July 28th, 2019, Antonio Brown uploaded a video to his YouTube channel. The title of it is The Reason Antonio Brown Demanded A Trade From The Steelers. It’s an extremely informative and well-produced video that Brown clearly believes is an accurate portrayal of a story focusing on him — even if it doesn’t always portray Brown in the best light.
He stole that video from us.
Alex wrote and produced the episode of Beef History. Jiazhen directed it. Mike helped on the edit. All of that is clear from the description on Brown’s YouTube page, since he also copied the description from our video and added “Video Credit: SB Nation.” The only changes made by Brown(‘s assistant) were the title (ours is called Antonio Brown’s beef with Ben Roethlisberger was heated, sudden, and so avoidable) and a Brown Productions watermark over our watermark.
To us, this was just a funny, hard to believe moment. The comments encouraged us to take legal action or claim copyright infringement, or they got mad at us for noticing what happened and commenting on it.
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Note: Juganott is in fact not(t) subscribed to us anymore. They are still subscribed to the official Angry Birds YouTube channel, which does make it hurt more than I expected. I hope they are well regardless.
When you boil down what we do and how we make videos, it’s kinda weird. Everything is secondhand. We bring ourselves to the stories we tell, we research them and rebuild them into something distinctly us, but they still belong to someone else — as do the materials used that we are either editorializing or have a subscription to use for editorial purposes (shout out Samantha, Lindley, Olivia, and the rest of the legal team). So when he posted the video (three and a half months after we originally uploaded it), there wasn’t much to do but laugh.
It was validation for the work by Alex, Jiazhen, and Mike. It was confirmation of a story well told in the most extreme way. And it was kinda cool that one of the athletes we focused on watched the thing and felt strongly enough about it to promote it. Maybe next time they can be more like Shaq though.
