In YouTube’s ‘Grand Theft Auto’ Community, Video Ideas Flow Up The Food Chain

No YouTube sub-community engenders drama quite like the gamers, and the latest source of controversy is Grand Theft Auto V. A Kotaku report has detailed a predatory ecosystem in which some creators with millions of subscribers blatantly copy ideas first shared by smaller channels.

The story pays particular attention to a smaller creator, RZED, as well as two larger ones, Sernandoe, and NoughtPointFourLive. RZED has about 37,000 subscribers, while Sernandoe and NoughtPointFour combine to attract more than three million fans. How have the latter two channels pulled in so many viewers? In part, by lifting RZED’s ideas without crediting him. In one case, Sernandoe copied a video concept from RZED and posted his own version without even bothering to alter the title. In another, NoughtPointFour made only slight alterations to a video thumbnail while swiping RZED’s idea for a yacht-related stunt within GTA V.

As RZED notes in the Kotaku article, fighting for proper credit can be difficult because larger creators can weaponize their fan bases to push around smaller operations. “These types of channels have contacts that can auto flag videos to take smaller YouTubers down,” RZED said.

As commenters on Kotaku’s article have noted, popular artists cribbing from their less-successful peers is something that goes back a long time, and there’s no easy way to stop a top creator from pulling ideas from those below him on the food chain. All we can really do is acknowledge that this sort of plagiarism does exist and urge creators to always give due credit to the channels that inspire their videos, no matter how big those channels may be.