January 02, 2025 | Read Online

TOGETHER WITH

It's Thursday and when it comes to Squid Game, Netflix is the true victor. The premiere of Season 2 marks the streaming service's biggest TV debut yet, with 68 million views flooding in after just four days.

Today's News

️‍🤔 A YouTuber goes head-to-head with a Nintendo troll
🛣️ Bluesky and Threads take different paths
🪩 New Year's Rockin' Eve put creators center stage
📀 A DVD rental store is still alive and kickin' in the UK

TROLL PATROL

A troll got a YouTuber's Nintendo videos wrongly deleted. How did YouTube let it happen?

The context: It's no secret that Nintendo has a tense relationship with YouTubers. The publisher's reluctance to let fans post videos about its IP often manifests in copyright strikes, leading some creators (including PointCrow, Austin John, and Retro Game Corps.) to stop making content about Nintendo games altogether.

The takedown: Others, like longtime YouTuber Domtendo, have continued posting about their favorite games despite the risk. The aforementioned creator has been making content about Nintendo titles since 2009—so when he received a Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) takedown notice from YouTube for his 43-video series on The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom, he wasn't initially surprised.

Then he realized the person who filed the takedown request might not actually be affiliated with Nintendo at all. According to The Verge, the filer's email address was a personal account, created using encryption service Proton Mail and attached to the name "Tatsumi Masaaki, Nintendo Legal Department, Nintendo of America."

Domtendo appealed the takedown notice on the basis of "Tatsumi"'s questionable identity, leading YouTube to reinstate his videos and remove the copyright strikes. Eventually, the creator also reached out to Nintendo directly to confirm whether it had a Tatsumi Masaaki on staff. It didn't.

The response: Domtendo theorizes that "Tatsumi" was a troll with access to his community Discord server. If that scenario is correct, it means a single bad actor was able to use YouTube's system to trigger two strikes against a creator's account. A third would have caused the permanent deletion of Domtendo's channel.

In its Copyright Transparency Report, YouTube says over 6% of takedown requests filed through its digital form are likely fake and that the webform has a "10 times higher attempted abuse rate" than "copyright removal tools with limited access." YouTube spokesperson Jack Malon told The Verge that it has "dedicated teams working to detect and prevent abuse," but wouldn't comment on how "Tatsumi Masaaki" slipped through the cracks.

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HEADLINES IN BRIEF 📰

Will Bluesky or Threads be Twitter's successor? As 2025 kicks into high gear, the two X alternatives are taking different approaches to everything from news to moderation. (Engadget)
TikTok parent company Bytedance has denied claims that it plans to spend as much as $7 billion to expand its access Nvidia GPUs in 2025. (TechNode)
Former FCC chairman Ajit Pai has urged the Supreme Court to uphold a potential ban on TikTok despite President-elect Donald Trump's recent show of support for the platform. (Gizmodo)
X owner Elon Musk changed his profile name to "Kekius Maximus" on Tuesday, triggering a 900% rise in the crypto value of the same-named memecoin. (New York Post)

ROCK AROUND THE CLOCK

Creators rang in 2025 as guest stars on New Year's Rockin' Eve

The New Year extravaganza: 2025 is already shaping up to be a big year for creators. On December 31, YouTubers and TikTokers took to the stage as special guests at Dick Clark's New Year's Rockin' Eve with Ryan Seacrest. Viewers who tuned into the show—which kicked off on ABC at 8 PM ET—were treated to appearances from YouTube vets Rhett & Link, "very demure" TikTok sensation Jools Lebron, cucumber enthusiast Logan Moffitt, and rapper Harry Mack.

TikTok-platinum songs also played a prominent role in the extravaganza, with performances of "Austin (Boots Stop Workin')" by Dasha, "From the Start" by Laufey, "Nasty" by Tinashe, and more.

The slate: In case you missed it, here's a quick rundown of New Year's Rockin' Eve (per Dick Clark Productions):

Rhett & Link marked the 26th season of their weekday variety YouTube show Good Mythical Morning.
Moffitt brought the cukes to "serve up a vegetable themed 'Happy New Year' message."
Lebron joined co-host Rita Ora to celebrate Dictionary.com naming "demure" as word of the year. The two also judged 2024's top news events and trends to determine whether or not they qualified as "very demure."
Mack did his part to get the crowd amped up, weaving through Times Square to solicit random words from audience members and deliver a freestyle rap.
On the non-creator side of things, music industry staples like Carrie Underwood, the Jonas Brothers, Alanis Morrisette, Natasha Bedingfield, and T-Pain brought the beat with guest appearances and performances.

WATCH THIS 📺

The UK's only DVD rental store is forty years old and thriving

The store: When Colin Richards opened TVL Allstar Video in 1984, he figured the Suffolk-based shop would be around for "about five or six years." Four decades later, Richards' biz is "still going strong"—except now, it's the only surviving DVD rental store in the entire UK.

The selection: So, what kind of DVDs are cinephiles checking out in the mid-'20s? Richards says TVL Allstar's most popular flicks include classics like Poltergeist, Scream, and Indecent Proposal. With timeless options like those on the shelves (and roughly 8,500 other DVDs to choose from), we're not surprised that the store is still alive and kicking after all these years.

Check out Richards' interview with SWNS here to find out more about TVL Allstar's decades-long success.

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