A little over a week ago, “Dr. Chaps” Gordon Klingenschmitt filed a series of bogus copyright complaints against our YouTube account that eventually resulted in our entire account being terminated by YouTube. Following the removal of our account, Klingenschmitt sent out a press release declaring that we “repeatedly stole, copied, and re-published without permission” his videos and bragging that he had been successful in “silencing their hate-speech campaign.”
In an interview with The Christian Post today, Klingenschmitt continued to brag about what he had done, saying that he was forced to get our account terminated because we were supposedly stealing his content and misrepresenting it as our own while removing comments from our videos that voiced support for him:
In an interview with The Christian Post, Klingenschmitt explained that he began filing complaints against RWW “because I got tired of their theft, copyright infringement, and piracy of my original video content.”
“They copy my videos and republish them under their own brand and logo, pretending as if they were the original creators, raising money for their cause, and failing to give credit,” said Klingenschmitt.
“Then they allow their followers to post comments, including death threats against me, and refuse to delete those death threats despite their admin power and history of moderating or deleting other comments in my favor, which they don’t like.”
Klingenschmitt also told CP that if RWW halts their alleged piracy of his content and remove the threats from their comments section, “then I may be willing to drop the case and forgive them.”
It should come as no surprise that literally nothing Klingenschmitt claims is actually true. The videos we post are not theft or copyright infringement and are protected by Fair Use. On top of that, no reasonable person could ever mistakenly believe that we were the “original creators” of the Klingenschmitt clips, or any other clip, that we have ever posted. Certainly, no rational person would believe that we are the “original creators” of any of the dozens of Pat Robertson or Glenn Beck clips posted to our account.
Furthermore, as we explained before, we do not moderate the comments posted on YouTube, so we certainly were not engaging in the practice of removing comments in Klingenschmitt’s favor.
Finally, we already had filed counter-claims against Klingenschmitt’s first two copyright claims when our account was terminated. Based on extensive past experience and YouTube’s guidelines for handling such claims, we expect that the first of these counter-claims will be decided within ten working days from the date they were submitted. As such, we hope that within the new few days, the first of Klingenschmitt’s bogus claims against our account should expire, thus negating the “three strikes” that took down our account and resulting in the restoration of our account and all of our videos.
We don’t have to beg Klingenschmitt’s forgiveness and hope that he’ll “be willing to drop the case and forgive” us because, by the middle of this week or so, his effort to shut us down by filling frivolous copyright claims against us should have run its course. Hopefully our account will be back up and running soon, simply by virtue of us having followed YouTube’s standard procedure for challenging those who file phony copyright claims.
