How Youtube banned our channel and how we restored it

    One morning, we saw a letter from YouTube in the mail: “ Due to repeated or serious violations of our community guidelines, your YouTube account has been suspended .”

    We at Alconost make videos for applications, games and services, and our Youtube channel is the only (until recently) place where we store all our videos. The ban of the account meant that all the videos that we had ever posted on the network (on our website, on social networks, in posts on Habré, etc.) were not available. Instead of videos, viewers saw only the message “Account blocked”, and when we switched to the channel itself, we came across a charge of fraud and spam.



    There is nothing on our channel that could be classified as “cheating, spam, fraud . " Looking ahead, we say that we have proved our point and, as a result, restored our channel. But what we had to do for this - read under the cut.

    Reason for ban


    Following the first account blocking email, we received another one: “ YouTube community members flagged one or more of your videos as inappropriate. Flagged videos are reviewed by the YouTube team for community violations. After reviewing the following videos, we came to the conclusion that they contain materials that violate our principles . ”

    Here is the video that was mentioned in the letter:


    After “broken up”, we removed this video from Youtube far from sin and posted it on Vimeo.

    As you can see, there is nothing seditious in the video. This is the trailer we made for Disk Drill , a product that allows you to recover information from damaged hard drives in Mac OS.

    Perhaps the video was recorded by users who were unable to recover information (for example, if something was recorded on top of it), or competitors of the client, or our competitors. Perhaps the audience was embarrassed by the call to try the free version of the product: it allows you to view deleted files and make sure that they can be restored, and the restoration itself occurs after the full version has been paid.

    Appeal


    If it happens that your Youtube account is banned, you can appeal: https://support.google.com/accounts/contact/suspended?p=youtube&rd=1
    By the way, deleting the offending video is not worth it - Youtube’s decision will not affect , but it’s impossible to appeal the verdict .

    Of course, we exercised our right to challenge the ban account. Given that we work with native translators, our appeal was in perfect English. But this did not help either: except for the letter confirming the completion of the form, they received no answer.

    Frustrated, we began to fill the channel on Vimeo and update hundreds of publications throughout the network in which our videos were present.

    Help of lawyers


    Our last hope was the American lawyer Dmitry Dubograev and his colleagues from the company Femida.us . We met in the ISDEF community , and then opened a company in the States with their help and consulted on various legal issues. These guys, like us, specialize in services for IT companies, and among their clients are such giants as Kaspersky, Alawar, Gaijin Entertainment, ElcomSoft, Polimaster, InvisibleCRM.

    In response to our “help, we have a YouTube channel blocked here” guys from Femida.us promptly made a thorough English-language appeal to Youtube on their own behalf. But first, they asked us a lot of questions about the situation, so that the letter would be true, complete and based on the real situation. Three pages is too much to copy all the text here, so just give a link to the letter .

    In the appeal, the lawyers described the principle of operation of the product, which is described in the video, emphasized that there is nothing in the video that could deceive the viewer, as well as the fact that on the client’s channel this video received a total of one million views ( video made in different languages). According to lawyers, the letter should be reasoned and thoroughly (possibly even excessively) describing the situation.

    In addition, a significant part of the letter talked about who Alconost is, what we do, how many years we work, and what we are “decent and fluffy”. As the lawyers explained, instilling a positive opinion about yourself and putting yourself on the “side of good and truth” is a must-have for any official appeal or appeal.

    It is noteworthy that despite the fact that the letter is mainly “asking” and “explaining,” in such letters “from a lawyer” there is always a direct or veiled threat. After all, even monsters such as YouTube, can not act arbitrarily and also must adhere to the rules. Otherwise, the damage caused by them unlawfully may result in legal action.

    It’s not so easy to reach Youtube, so the letter was sent by regular mail, e-mail, FedEx, and also submitted via the support form.

    Result


    The letter was sent on February 24, and on March 4, lawyers received a response from Youtube regarding the review of the circumstances of blocking our channel: “After checking your YouTube account, we made sure that it does not violate the Terms of Use, and resumed it. Your account is active again and you can use it .



    Our conclusion is that running an international business even for a small company without legal support can be difficult. To paraphrase a well-known quote, a good word and a lawyer can achieve much more than just a good word. We hope you don’t have to deal with such an unpleasant thing as banning your Youtube account. But if ever this happens, now you know what to do.


    About the author

    Alconost localizes applications, games and sitesinto 60 languages. Native translators, linguistic testing, cloud platform with API, continuous localization, project managers 24/7, any format of string resources.

    We also make advertising and training videos - for sites that sell, image, advertising, training, teasers, expliner, trailers for Google Play and the App Store.

    Read more: https://alconost.com


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