SINGAPORE: After a Bulgarian YouTuber titled his March 12 video “A Big YouTuber Stole My Work?”, the Singaporean content creator Sneaky Sushii apologised via email, taking responsibility for not attributing the other man’s work.
Toni Vesdream, who is now based in Denmark, posted a nearly 8-minute video where he said that he had recently stumbled upon a video from Sneaky Sushii titled “This horror film was so real, people reported it to the police.”
A year ago, Mr Vesdream had made a video about the same movie, titled “The horror film so real, the FBI investigated it.”
Considering he had taken at least three weeks on research for his video, it was unsurprising that Mr Vesdream called out the many similarities between his and the Singaporean YouTuber’s, which was posted six months ago, and whose title has since been changed to “This video sucks.”
Sneaky Sushii, who is only known publicly as “Jay,” is well-known in Singapore, with over 700,000 followers on YouTube, where his videos have gotten millions of views.
Nevertheless, Mr Vesdream was unusually gracious and said that the experience of watching Sneaky Sushii had been a validating experience, saying that he does not “own a copyright of an idea.”
“Anyone can make a video about anything,” he added.
However, he followed this up by saying that when he made a video about a movie that a Chinese billionaire tried to make, many of his ideas had been based on a particular article, which he not only credited, but he also reached out to the author and featured him in the video.
“If one particular source is the main inspiration for (a story)… common courtesy would have that person give some sort of credit,” he said, although he admitted that there may be times that he fails to do this himself.
“I don’t always do it right, but I try to do it with integrity,” he said, adding that he had no hard feelings and that no one should “send any hate” to anyone else.
On Sunday (March 15), Mr Vesdream posted an update in the comments to his video, saying that Sneaky Sushii had apologised,
“He took full responsibility, he apologised, and has committed to properly crediting his sources in the future. As I said in my video, there are no hard feelings. I appreciate and accept his apology. We all make mistakes; what’s important is to learn from them,” he wrote.
Many commenters praised Mr Vesdream for how he handled the whole situation.
“You gave this larger creator a lot of grace and kindness. One can only hope to have your kind of integrity after having your content stolen,” one wrote.
“As a homeschooled content creator from SG, I have learned graciousness from you. Thanks for modelling that and sharing this experience. It’s important to be ethical. It must have been hard for you to go through the different stages of emotions before posting this,” another added.
In addition to its new title, Sneaky Sushi’s video caption now says, “As many of you may have realised, this video drew huge inspiration from Toni Vesdream’s amazingly well-researched video… As a content creator myself, I should have known to give credit to the sources I use to make my own videos.”
He also wrote in a comment, “Moving forward, all sources will be cited, and credits will be given for any source material I use during my research. This was a lapse in judgment on my part, and I sincerely apologise to Toni.” /TISG
Read also: YouTuber Sneaky Sushii Challenges Singaporean Content Norms
