DMCA, Klay telling us not to film and other Twitter misinformation

10:00AM PDT: This is for the 1% of people on Twitter innocently going around trying to seek knowledge and information, not the remaining 99% of outraged and entitled folks who go on there to complain, literally addicted to that app. They have no hope. Zombie apocalypse. I don’t need to explain myself to those types.

Now, despite all the negative (surprise, from the most negative app ever invented!) publicity, we still got like 15 email signups to the website and one paid subscriber, so I guess the marketing gurus are right: negative publicity is still publicity. This post is for those types of people who ignored the cesspool and ended up signing up to get informed of the behind-the-scenes news that we provide.

And for those people who are indeed not yet zombified into incessantly outraged human beings, thumb-tapping their woes on an app on their phone, 280 characters at a time, all you have to do is look at recording artists, their labels, as well as movies and their studios, to understand what’s happening. I don’t think I need to explain further. [Although it’s explained at the bottom where I copied and pasted our notice that now goes on every potentially viral practice footage clip that we post on there. Because some kids just don’t understand the whole copyright thing.]

I don’t need to spend extra time with this post explaining myself when my priority is uploading more practice footage ranging from Stephen Curry from the logo (two videos) to Kevon Looney and Langston Galloway shooting threes.

I just finished that a moment ago. Maybe slept a few hours in between. But now I have to get ready soon to go cover Warriors practice again and they’re early today at 11:15AM, after which they head on a plane to Portland, which I will also be doing tomorrow morning, really early,

Langston Galloway!?! Who does that? Nobody films a training camp invite working out. Loon is probably the least flashy guy on the team. Why would I post two videos of him? It’s because I didn’t know I’d get him shooting threes later on before I had to head upstairs to cover Juan Toscano-Anderson at the podium.

I didn’t want to have Loon shooting jumpers go to waste, just in case there’s a Loon fan out there in YouTube land, and there are. Outraged people on Twitter would say, “Yeah but you get revenue for that.” I mean, yeah, but our Looney videos do not really make any money lol. Come on. It’s Kevon. Even he would tell you not to waste your time watching him.

And I don’t think it’s worth my time explaining myself when I had Juan acknowledge my question in his Q&A. I have Brandon Payne sitting in my text messages answering my questions about Steph’s adjustments to his workout routine that I noticed. I recently recommended Jonathan Kuminga’s manager to the barber that most of the team uses. Also I’m planning to DM Jordan Poole’s buddy to get his take on JP’s training camp. He’s seen video of scrimmages. Why?

Because I’m about to write about why I think JP will end up being the starting 2-guard on opening night and it would be nice to have a quote or two. Plus I need to cut the video of Poole’s interview where I asked him directly about if Steve Kerr has discussed that with him, even had to come up with an example on the fly to JP after he gave the standard, “What you mean?” to reporters that he usually does — I actually think that trait of his is funny and a unique, effective PR tool.

Speaking of two-guards, the zombies have twisted the truth on what happened with Klay Thompson. When I walked into practice, Klay being Klay, he was barking stuff. There was no background music so everyone could hear him. We had no context, though. He didn’t want the content of his barks to be heard, so he pointed at me and said, “Are you recording?” I hit stop the made a motion to cut my throat, and he did the same to acknowledge that I had cut the film.

Later, meaning several hours ago late last night when I reviewed all the footage and tried to figure out the order of the uploads, I texted Chris DeMarco, Klay’s best friend on the team, what was up with Klay.

“CD” told me it was okay to post it as long as I muted Klay. So that’s what I did. I also told CD, “Thank you for letting the fans see Klay shoot a few shots.” CD sent back a thank-you as well.

First of all, all these Warriors are such great guys, including Kerr and Bob Myers, which is why in the past I’ve gone out of my way to defend them on Twitter. Which is why a certain segment of #WarriorsTwitter already hates me. Apparently, I was even once accused of being too optimistic on a podcast. Imagine that! Lol.

Secondly, in this latest negative publicity campaign, one of their bully tactics is to point out that Klay told me not to record him and that I have disrespected Klay by doing so, therefore I am a terrible human being.

Therefore you should not follow LGW! Wait. What? You don’t want to see Steph shooting from the logo anymore? No, that can’t be it. Oh, you are a terrible human being for not wanting your original work to be re-published for free on a platform where every user feels like they are entitled to free content from everywhere. However, certain people get an exemption: recording artists and everyone involved in movies (and NFL highlights), because they’re cool. Even though they seek the same copyright remedies as I do.

Btw the “you are a terrible human being” narrative is so prevalent on that app! Sigh. Bully-ism at its finest. Typical Twitter fare: manipulate an angle of the story for personal usage for an attack. How many times did Donald Trump do that? Hint: Less than certain people on #WarriorsTwitter. Jack Dorsey understands this is happening, right? He ought to be ashamed at what his app has become. It was so much better in 2015-16-ish. People on Twitter cheered together and tweeted positive things, became friends, even in real life. Since then it’s been the zombie apocalypse.

Now, speaking of Klay, as for me screen-recording his IG Lives and reposting those on YouTube. First of all I watermark it with his IG handle @klaythompson. Secondly, he could very well submit a copyright takedown and that’s fine. Anyone who’s been a YouTube creator has, at some point, received a copyright notice, largely because of the recording industry’s vigilance on background music. I actually have to pay attention to that when Klay sings on his boat. So anyways, yeah I copy those. But if he wants me to take them down, no problem. I’ll even help him find out who else copied them.

One of the reasons I do it is because not everyone has Instagram, you know? Klay also doesn’t save his Lives. I’m also not the only one reposting them on YouTube. In fact, I’ve been copyright-claimed before by another channel that uploaded the same Captain Klay video, or part of it. It was sorted out because YouTube’s copyright process is way more mature than Twitter’s, but another channel copying the same Instagram livestream then claiming copyright ownership and issuing me a takedown is the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever seen in terms of copyrights on YouTube.

Btw NBC Sports Bay Area copies Klay livestreams and tweets clips on Twitter. Nobody turns that fact into a grenade tweeted back at them. I mean, if the potential revenue from all that was more than a drop in the bucket in Klay’s bank account, if it affected food on his table, then yeah, issue a copyright notice to me, to NBCSBA, to all the other aggregators, and I and them will happily take them down (YouTube would automatically do that in their ecosystem, though, so again Twitter sucks).

Matter of fact, Klay ought to just have his own livestreams on his own platform. So you can see how more and more athletes are moving to YouTube (Kevin Durant in 2016 and more recently Carmelo Anthony, Draymond Green, the list goes on). That’s because there’s no monetization infrastructure on Twitter, IG and the like.

Sigh. I’m tired and done explaining myself. Again if you’re in that 1% of Twitter users who aren’t part of their zombie apocalypse, where making fun of people or as I like to say in NBA parlance (I’ve written before: Luke Loucks taught me this when we were on the road for the Seattle preseason game one time), “throwing people under the bus” has become a currency, if you signed up for Twitter just seeking knowledge and information about the Warriors and not all the other bullcrap outrage, you found me. Most Hated Warriors Media Guy, or at least I’m quickly catching up to my boy Tim Kawakami hahaha!

I’m off to Warriors practice…

[Comments below are closed, but if you do want to say something positive, comment on our YouTube channel, the environment there is WAY more supportive there than on #WarriorsTwitter.]

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Actually, a couple more factual things

This part was written after practice at around 3:00PM (Go Niners!) as I thought of a couple things on the drive to Chase Center…

Watermarks don’t do much

About the watermarking: Just watermarking does nothing as far as increasing the followers or sending people to YouTube. Again, this is no different than a recording artist or movie studio not wanting people to repost their original work on a non-monetizable platform. Like musicians and film-makers, I don’t get a W-2. Beatwriters do, so they and other writers’ strategy is totally different, albeit imo misguided (because YouTubers end up copying their videos on Twitter and monetizing them on YouTube, ironically).

This guy @dubs4o8 who copied three clips of Steph and Wiggs and got close to like a million views (definitely at least 500k by the time I googled the Twitter copyright process, and zero views of which I’ll get revenue for), he got his Twitter klout out of it. I got nothing. Good ol’ @gswchris used to sometimes copy clips of mine but he always explicitly tagged me and even attached the link to the YouTube video. I never submitted a copyright claim on him because treat was like a hat tip. He got suspended because probably of some copyrighted music.

But now that #WarriorsTwitter has made this bigger than it should’ve been, I’m going to continue to issue DMCA takedowns as I see necessary. Twitter should not have any automatically playing LGW videos on it. Only YouTube links. I don’t want zombies to watch my videos. I don’t want their money. But I do want the people who are not addicted to bullying and throwing people (usually Kerr and Myers) under the bus. I want people who are not only positive-thinkers but also who want to learn something new about the Warriors through what I’ve seen and heard behind-the-scenes, ever since 2010.

LGW has actually been suspended twice on Twitter for having background copyrighted music. The last time, it was a repost of an IG clip of Durant at youth camp. It was even hard to hear the background music. So, I’ve been on the receiving end of those.

Dubs408 will be fine. It wasn’t personal. When you see 6-7 figures of views and it’s your video and you got almost nothing out of it, it’s business. It did make me mad that Twitter allows this to happen all the time, plus the hard-to-find copyright claim process (you can’t do it from within the app, and that is a serious and suspicious omission). They should have a better way to prevent any random person from doing this, the way YouTube does. If they did, Dubs4o8 might’ve been stopped in his tracks rather than this drawn-out process where obviously his feelings were hurt. I mean, I had no choice, no thanks to Twitter’s poor copyright infrastructure. So being a little extra upset with that, my complaint to Twitter was strongly-worded.

Anyways, @Dubs408 will be fine. He even reappeared as @Dubs804 or @dubs8o4 and started the smear campaign on me. So, I mean, he’s doing fine. He can start copying videos all over again. His same followers know where to find him. Also he was suspended before, but idk why. The other day was the first time I’ve sent in a copyright violation for a YouTube video of mine. And it looked like he had a lot of other proprietary video on his timeline. Maybe my claim was the straw that broke the camel’s back. One DMCA usually isn’t going to get you suspended unless you’ve been suspended before or if you have multiple tweets doing it, or if it’s the recording industry (why is it more vigilant for record labels, Twitter? Is it because they have better lawyers than the small copyright owner?).

Also my stuff gets copied all the time on YouTube, by other channels, even with the watermark. It sucks because I actually lose revenue on those, not the nebulous “klout”. I don’t cry about it and post all these negative things about these channels. Of course, YouTube doesn’t make it so easy to do that, like Twitter does, sadly. I submit a counter-complaint on YouTube and that’s that. If it gets really dicey, I can always contact my lawyer.

Twitter should obviously make it possible to monetize our videos on their platform. So should Instagram (and TikTok). I don’t have time to find sponsors. So that’s why I embrace YouTube, aside from the superior ability to deal with negativity (you can ban people from ever commenting again on your videos, although they can still watch them; it’s great).

Instagram DMs

I’m being portrayed as some kind of creepy stalker on IG. Fwiw, my three closest friends in the world, I met on IG and are Warriors fans (duh). I’ll just say their names are B, L and S. Now, one time I told “L” about a Festus Ezeli podcast. She had actually never even heard of him (my people aren’t always diehards, but they do always root for GSW and never have any ill-will towards any player). Ezeli, one of my favorite athletes in the whole world because he’s so positive about everyone and everything, DM’ed “L” and they’re now friends or at least acquaintances.

There is nothing wrong with contacting somebody by IG DM in a friendly way especially when there is something in common. The funny thing is, whenever I find out someone is active on #WarriorsTwitter (you know, the complain-y type), I generally shut down the conversation anyways.

But yeah, I’m apparently creepy because #WarriorTwitter took a morsel of information and turned it into character defamation. Way to go, light blue birdie app!

Oh yeah, after practice today (I’m finally home watching the Niners game, second half), a Warriors player actually DM’ed me. It was pretty cool. So you know, I have other things to look forward to in life. It used to be that beatwriter Rusty Simmons would see me at Warrior practice always on Twitter. He told me he was worried he was missing something. Fast-forward six years: nah, Rus, you ain’t missing anything. Lol.

So I ain’t worried about no #WarriorsTwitter zombie. The more hate out there there is, the better. They’re fulfilling my NBA dream of not only knowing Warriors players on a first name basis, but also having haters. I literally had no idea this was possible. Lmao! This is great! I wonder what I should do with it? Maybe I’ll hit up Nick Young (he used to DM back “Lol” at our funny posts that have him in it) and see if I can get sponsored by his brand, “Most Hated”. He’ll get a kick out of a media member having haters.

As “J” on our Discord said, “I just think you are getting popular and people are starting to get intimidated. You got haters just like Steph.😂”

Alright, as Gabe (another author on this site, very active on our Discord) has trademarked, “I spent too much time on that.”

Again, Discord access is free when you subscribe at $5/mo or $50/yr:

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It’s great that it’s so easy to determine which Warriors fans you want to hang out with, though (online-ish I guess, as all Twitterers seem to be on their best behavior in person, which is a sign of weakness in my book lol).

So maybe this devolution of Twitter is all a good thing. See the YouTube schpiel that I promised below this pic.

That YouTube notice we put on some vids

WE AGGRESSIVELY DEFEND OUR COPYRIGHT: We are not a billion-dollar TV company nor are we gainfully employed with a W-2 paycheck that comes every two weeks as your favorite Warriors beatwriter might be. Their goal may be to post content on free social media platforms for widespread consumption and for “klout” to boost their careers to the next higher tier of W-2 paychecks. That is not our goal. We put almost all of our content on YouTube because it has a monetization infrastructure in place to reward content creators for their hard work. Twitter and Instagram and the like do not. Please understand, this is no different than a recording artist and its label or a movie and its studio preventing you from reposting original works on the same free social media platforms (try doing that, you’ll see that they’re more aggressive than we are because they have the resources). As such, we make no apologies. We have worked our butts off for over a decade to get where we are today, to have the trust and rapport of not only the Golden State Warriors management in knowing that the footage we capture will promote their culture of teamwork and dedication, but also their players and the personnel surrounding those players trust that our intentions are positive and not yellow journalism thirsty for controversial headlines. We choose to be rewarded for our years of efforts and sacrifices by having our work available only on this YouTube channel and our subscription website https://www.letsgowarriors.com. Hopefully you can treat us with the same respect as you would recording artists and the movie industry. To those of you who understand this, thank you for your ongoing support.