So on Sunday 12/27, Bryan Tew’s YouTube channel with approximately 5K subscribers was shut down for good due to repeated infringement of copyrights.
Bryan has been known to upload clips from Hollywood movies, usually psychological thrillers, that supposedly explain some aspect of his life and what he perceives to be happening to him as a TI. He also listens to commercial music playing on a speaker while he is recording himself on YouTube live (serious YouTubers know that this is also a no-no).
In both cases, this earns him either a forced monetization of his infringing video (meaning YouTube will place ads on his video, with all the ad revenue going to the copyright holder), or a removal of the video and a copyright strike placed on his record. Too many strikes results in your channel being permanently deleted, along with all of your content.
I believe the last video Bryan uploaded was a re-upload of a video that “Ella Free” created about the “TI Day” event that happened earlier this year (2020) where a bunch of TIs made video testimonies about being a TI.
Bryan reuploaded this video with a title and description suggesting (with no evidence) that all of these TIs were “crisis actors” designed to discredit the TI movement.
The problem here (apart from being a ridiculous paranoid lunatic) is that Bryan has no rights to re-upload copyrighted content. There is such a concept known as “fair use” under copyright laws (in the US at least) where you can use a limited amount of copyrighted content if you turn it into a commentary or a news report or similar. However, simply reuploading a video and making an dumb claim about it in the description box isn’t sufficient to claim a fair use exception.
It appears that the re-upload of Ella’s video was the final straw that took down his account. This is not surprising to me considering that Bryan pretty much considers 90% of the TI movement, Ella included, to be government agents, and the people who are the target of Bryan’s unfounded claims dislike being labeled this way.
Ella flagged the video and this was the end of Bryan’s channel. He had one more chance to clean up his act w/r/t copyrights and failed with this video upload.
In usual fashion, Bryan is blaming the “shadow government” for his account shutdown. Since it happened right before his scheduled flight to Ecuador, he thinks it is no coincidence and that They(tm) are doing this to remove all of his “evidence” he needs to make an asylum claim.
Of course regular viewers will know that Bryan applied for asylum in Ecuador a couple of years ago and was subsequently rejected, so that’s kinda silly.
Being that I have a bit of interest in Bryan’s antics, I suspected that one day his videos would disappear for whatever reason. My feeling at the time was that Bryan would do something either homicidal and/or suicidal which would result in social media companies scrubbing his accounts as often is the case.
I have a pretty comprehensive archive of Bryan’s YouTube channel. It doesn’t have every single video he’s ever made but it has most of them. I began this by using video downloader tools manually every once in a while, but sometimes he uploaded a video and then deleted it before I had a chance to capture it.
If there is a particular video of Bryan you are interested in seeing again, let me know (help me narrow it down by date as there are literally thousands of videos).
Bryan, I’ll even let you have a copy of your videos. But it’s on one condition – you must agree to an interview with me by email where you answer my questions.