YouTuber Jacksfilms alleges SSSniperwolf, one of the highest-paid creators on the platform, 'steals' content: 'Disheartening'

The feud between YouTubers Jack Douglass, professionally known as Jacksfilms, and Alia “Lia” Shelesh, more commonly known as SSSniperwolf, has opened up a conversation about who gets credit for viral success.

Recently, Douglass uploaded an 11-minute video alleging that Shelesh shouldn’t be praised by YouTube because she “steals” content from TikTok users and a lot of the time doesn’t provide them with proper credit.

A lot of YouTubers and even TikTokers have found success by reposting someone else’s content or just reacting to another video. But according to Douglass, there’s a difference between adding something to the original source content versus leveraging it for your own personal gain without giving proper credit.

Who are Jacksfilms and SSSniperwolf?

Douglass joined YouTube in 2006 and attracted his 4 million subscribers with his parody videos and reviews. Shelesh posted her first YouTube video in 2013 — a compilation video of Call of Duty: Black Ops fails — and in 2020 started transitioning from filming video game reviews to reaction videos, which got her more views. She has 33 million subscribers and is one of the highest-paid YouTubers, with a reported net worth of $16 million.

The two initially crossed paths when Douglass said he watched a Know Your Meme video discussing Shelesh buying her first multimillion-dollar house. In the video, Douglass added that he was going to start filming himself reacting to Shelesh’s reaction videos.

Why are Jacksfilms and SSSniperwolf fighting?

Douglass has been open about his disdain for reaction content similar to what Shelesh has built her YouTube empire on for years. He has publicly called out a number of popular creators for, in his opinion, stealing content from other platforms and creators, as well as making parody videos mocking the reaction style.

Shelesh, however, publicly responded to one of Douglass’s tweets in June and accused him of stealing her ideas and being sexist in his complaints.

She reportedly tweeted and deleted multiple comments about Douglass, which he recapped with screenshots in a video titled “Sssniperwolf but every 10 seconds I read a tweet she sent me tonight.”

Then, on July 26, Douglass posted a video titled “Let’s tttalk about SSSniperwolf” in which he goes over his allegations against Shelesh. He said he was inspired to create the 11-minute video after seeing a tweet highlighting Shelesh’s recent keynote speech at 2023 VidCon.

“Have you ever read a tweet that broke your brain?” he asked, referencing the tweet from the official YouTube Creators account. “Seeing VidCon and YouTube boost this kind of activity is so disheartening.”

“She steals TikToks and ‘reacts’ to them,” he claimed. “Let’s talk about how egregious this freebooting is. In each of her hundreds and hundreds of videos, she plays other people’s TikToks and provides extremely base-level commentary.”

Freebooting is a form of piracy where someone uploads a video they don’t have the rights to. In this case, Douglass is alleging that Shelesh is freebooting TikToks by downloading them and putting them on her account without giving proper credit to the original creator.

The conversation around freebooting peaked in 2015 when YouTube creators accused Facebook of “encouraging” pages and accounts to freeboot their video content in an attempt for Facebook to establish itself as a competitor of YouTube. The problem was that the original YouTube creators were not getting credit or compensation for their work that was going viral on Facebook.

“Half of the TikToks [Shelesh] includes either crop out the original user name or just straight up don’t have one,” Douglass alleged. He included a screenshot of a recent video in which Shelesh reacted to 19 videos, 13 of which don’t have the creators’ usernames.

“That means there’s no way to find and support the original creators here,” Douglass continued. “All of the views and all of the revenue goes straight to SSSniperwolf.”

There is a setting on TikTok that allows people to download someone else’s TikTok videos — should that person have a public account and are over the age of 16. According to TikTok’s Terms of Service and Community Guidelines, “Under certain circumstances, you may be legally permitted to use another person’s copyrighted content without their person. This includes fair use and exceptions to copyright such as quotation, criticism and/or review.”

Douglass also addressed a common argument suggesting that Shelesh could be getting permission from the TikTok creators she features. Douglass claimed he and his team reached out to a number of creators who had TikToks featured in Shelesh’s videos and alleged they all said neither she nor a member of her team reached out to them for permission.

Under fair use, which Douglass describes in some detail, creators can use or feature copyright-protected material if it’s used in a way that’s described as “transformative” or brings a different meaning to the original material. For example, in Douglass’s early YouTube videos parodying infomercials, he was legally able to use copyrighted material because he was being satirical.

According to one of Shelesh’s tweets, she considers the “satire” to still be copying her content.

“Satire is supposed to be funny. It’s a way to undermine what I do,” she wrote. “Bro just wanted an excuse to copy me thinking it would be easy $$$ for him. He gave up because the videos end[ed] up getting ~30k views. Guess its harder than it looks huh?”

In Douglass’s opinion, Shelesh’s videos do not fall under that category of “transformative.”

“Her commentary isn’t so much transformative as it is just summarizing what we’re watching,” Douglass asserted. “It’s not even content, it’s ‘nontent.'”

To date, Shelesh has not responded to Douglass’s recent videos about her.

The back-and-forth has opened up a conversation around giving credit and compensation for original content.

“I’m tired of the streamer meta of sitting watching someone’s video essay start to finish with tens of thousands of viewers. I love Hasan but he does it, asmond, XQC, all of them do it,” one Reddit user claimed in a subreddit post about Douglass’s video. “Hasan watched one of my videos once and his live viewers were higher than my overall views, and his clips of him reacting also have more views than my 17 min long video. He praised what I was saying and I got like 3 whole ‘here from Hasan’ comments but it didn’t raise my viewers at all and it sucked.”

“It is crazy how streamers just sit there and ‘react’ to content creators who put in hours of actual work, research, and editing,” another person wrote. “You shouldn’t watch the reaction video as a substitute for the original material.”

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