| “ | Ladies and gentlemen, I am SidAlpha... | ” |
―SidAlpha's intro | ||
SidAlpha is an American YouTuber who is best known for his commentary on the gaming industry, whose content also includes, reviews, and gaming news.
Biography
Having started his channel in May 2015, interest in SidAlpha's channel surged in February 2017 when Dentola Studios hit him with a bogus DMCA strike to silence his criticism of the studio's practise of taking sample games from the Unity Asset Store and uploading those unaltered sample games to Steam's Greenlight service, a story which was signal boosted when YouTubers such as Jim Sterling and TotalBiscuit took up the story.
Alex Mauer DMCA controversy
On June 23rd 2017 SidAlpha reported on a wave of YouTubers playing the game Starr Mazer DSP being hit with DMCA strikes by the game's composer Alex Mauer, rather than the game's developer Imagos Softworks. It soon became clear when these YouTubers filed a counter-claim that Mauer was attempting to use these YouTubers to aid her in their own battle with Imagos, who Mauer claimed had not paid the agreed fee for Mauer's work on the game's soundtrack and sound effects, and this was the basis for Mauer's copyright strikes as Mauer believed the best way to get Imagos to cave in would be to unleash a wave of angry YouTubers upon them. Mauer's plan unsurprisingly backfired, given the policy is for the YouTuber to seek out the person filing the claim rather than who the person filing the claim says they should seek out, which led to Mauer becoming abusive and telling those demanding the strikes be removed that "Fucking playing video games is NOT a job! If there was a way to DMCA punch you in the face through my computer screen I would."
Within a couple of days of SidAlpha's initial video, the story was once again signal boosted by Jim Sterling and TotalBiscuit, even gaining coverage by The Know, while YouTuber (and copyright attorney) Leonard French took up Imagos' case against Mauer.
Things went from bad to worse after this, with Mauer then beginning to file DMCA strikes against at least sixty channels and a similar number of Twitch channels, and soon Mauer's attention also turned to Let's Plays of other games featuring music they had composed such as Death Road to Canada and River City Ransom, while Mauer's behaviour became increasingly erratic, for example forwarding e-mails to SidAlpha for no apparent reason.
As the story continued, Mauer began sending death threats to people, not least sending an e-mail to SidAlpha stating "I want to literally kill you" while in a further e-mail Mauer falsely accused SidAlpha of being transphobic and said "I want to kill myself but I have to kill youfirst [sic]"
On July 6th 2017, Mauer was served with a court summons by Leonard French, which led to Mauer asking both French and SidAlpha for help - requests which were denied, with SidAlpha bluntly telling Mauer to get an attorney - which led to Mauer stating they would be representing themselves in court.
List of Subscriber Milestones
SidAlpha hit 50,000 subscribers on July 6 2017