Copyright at the margins: Mapping informal platform governance through Wikitubia

Abstract

Platform governance research has prioritized formal mechanisms that can be codified in law or policy and audited with trace data. While such mechanisms merit attention, the focus risks overlooking informal yet influential practices that shape platform culture. We introduce a methodological approach for tracking informal platform governance through fan wikis, demonstrated through the case of copyright enforcement on YouTube. We annotated 149 copyright controversies from Wikitubia to understand how fans evaluate the use of intellectual property and copyright reporting tools. The wiki’s picture of copyright governance looks very different from YouTube’s official accounts: contributors rarely discussed Content ID and instead focused on cases filed by human petitioners. They talked about copyright controversies as political, economic, or interpersonal disputes, and judged the contextual legitimacy of enforcement through the perceived moral status of the target rather than legal principles. Our analysis demonstrates that informal platform governance is a semi-autonomous sphere with distinct actors, values, and practices that can complement or challenge mainstream approaches to platform governance.

Introduction

The field of platform governance investigates the social and political implications of digital platforms, especially platforms that host user-generated content, in order to contribute to contemporary policy debates. Such research, Tarleton Gillespie (2017) explains, tends to focus on either the governance of platforms or the governance by platforms. The former refers to regulations—local, national, supranational—concerning the conduct of platform corporations, while the latter refers to how platforms regulate the conduct of users through policy and design. A third, less prominent, strand of research is concerned with governance through platforms, or practices of community content moderation (Caplan, 2023). Across these strands, research privileges formal governance mechanisms, including major acts of legislation like the European Union’s Digital Services Act (e.g., Quintais, 2024; Van De Kerkhof, 2025), platform content policies (e.g., Hallinan et al., 2025b; Kopf, 2024), and evidence of enforcement practices documented in transparency reports or platform trace data (e.g., Chandrasekharan et al., 2018; Urman and Makhortykh, 2023). From a policy perspective, this focus fits with the push for greater platform transparency. Similarly, at a practical level, law and policy are often the most visible and accessible parts of platform governance. Yet the focus risks overlooking informal practices that shape user experiences and enable users, in turn, to shape platform culture.

Informal practices have long been recognized as a theoretically important aspect of governance, typically through the language of norms. Lawrence Lessig (2006) identifies norms as one of four modes of regulation alongside law, architecture, and the market. Similarly, Christian Katzenbach’s (2018) conceptual framework of governance, drawing from sociological institutionalism, lays out four dimensions: regulations, norms, discourse, and technology. While Lessig emphasizes market dynamics and Katzenbach emphasizes communication, they are united in their recognition of the importance of social norms and their insistence that the relationship between different modes of governance depends on context. In the context of platform governance, researchers have approached norms through their codification in, for example, the community-driven rules of subreddits (Fiesler et al., 2018) or platform-specific interaction affordances (Van Raemdonck et al., 2025). Other researchers have identified latent norms through moments of controversy (Reynolds, 2025; Sybert, 2022) or interviews with users (Fiesler et al., 2023). Building on this body of work, we develop an approach to track developments in informal platform governance beyond individual events or communities, taking advantage of an understudied artifact of platform culture: fan wikis.

A fan wiki is a collaboratively produced online resource devoted to an object of fandom such as a TV show, video game, or, in the case of our study, a social media platform. Fan wikis fall under the broader category of alternative or “alt” wikis, distinguished from Wikipedia by virtue of their topical focus or editorial standards (De Keulenaar et al., 2019). While “[f]ew technological developments have had more of a visible impact on participatory culture in the 2000s than the wiki” (Mittell, 2013: 38), fan wikis have proved a marginal object of internet research. This is surprising, given that fan wikis document cultural objects (Mittell, 2013) and provide a venue for negotiating community boundaries, norms, and values (Dunlap and Wolf, 2010; Mittell, 2009). Bringing insights from fan studies into conversation with the field of platform governance, we approach Wikitubia, a fan wiki dedicated to YouTube and its creators, as a document of how creator communities participate in informal platform governance and a venue where social norms are both codified and contested. We focus on copyright, a central regulatory issue for YouTube (Gray, 2020) and an enduring point of conflict for creators (Edwards, 2018; Hallinan et al., 2024). Because there’s “always more than the law involved” in copyright governance (Katzenbach, 2018: 6), Wikitubia provides an ideal case to explore the relationship between social norms and other modes of governance, as well as to test the utility of fan wikis as a data source for platform governance research. Accordingly, we ask, based on what is documented on Wikitubia: What social norms govern copyright reporting among YouTube creators and their fans? And how do these norms relate to the technological and regulatory governance of copyright?

To answer these questions, we collected and annotated a unique dataset of 149 copyright controversies documented on Wikitubia. For each controversy, we identified relevant actors, attributed motivations for claiming copyright, criteria for evaluating the legitimacy of copyright enforcement, and references to copyright law. The wiki’s picture of copyright enforcement looks very different from YouTube’s official account, which foregrounds Content ID, the automated tool responsible for more than 99% of all copyright claims on the platform (Google, 2025), and major copyright holders like record labels and movie studios, who represent the biggest financial risk for the platform (Gray, 2020). By contrast, Wikitubia contributors rarely discussed Content ID and instead focused on political, economic, or interpersonal disputes among creators, especially those filed by human petitioners. They also rarely invoked copyright law, typically evaluating the legitimacy of enforcement through the moral status of the target. In what follows, we discuss the history of copyright governance on YouTube, the role of creators and fans in setting copyright norms, and the context of fan wikis. We present our method of analysis and primary findings, including the genre and geographic diversity of the dataset, the evidentiary practices of wiki contributors and editors, and our typology of copyright controversies. We frame the accounts of copyright disputes on Wikitubia as an example of collective norm-setting by fans, meant to pressure creators into informal systems of governance that incentivize particular approaches toward enforcing or, perhaps more often, not enforcing copyright protections, through the looming risk of social sanctions. We conclude by discussing informal platform governance as a semi-autonomous sphere with distinct actors, values, and practices that can complement or challenge mainstream approaches to copyright and related issues.

Literature review

Modes of copyright governance on YouTube

YouTube has faced the regulatory challenge of copyright management since the platform’s inception, with early users demonstrating a voracious appetite for clips of movies, TV shows, and music videos (Andrejevic, 2009). When YouTube was sold to Google in November 2006, Google had little time to celebrate their US$1.65 billion acquisition before the multinational entertainment conglomerate Viacom presented them with a US$1 billion lawsuit related to over 150,000 copyrighted clips on YouTube with roughly 1.5 billion views (Viacom International, Inc. v. YouTube, Inc, 2007: 3). In other words, Viacom was prepared to argue that more than half of YouTube’s value revolved around copyright-infringing content. Responding to the reputational and legal threat posed by the uncontrolled upload of copyrighted content, YouTube launched Content ID in 2007, a copyright management system that allows rightsholders to digitally fingerprint content, automatically identify violations, and either take down videos or claim their monetization. Content ID was and remains an industry-leading tool for copyright enforcement, and Google’s ongoing investment in Content ID demonstrates the company’s belief in the critical role it plays in protecting YouTube’s creative ecosystem.

In line with other forms of “tiered governance” (Caplan and Gillespie, 2020), Content ID is available only to large corporate entities whose “copyrighted content is heavily reposted” (Google, 2025) and comes with a dedicated team within YouTube for rightsholders to communicate with. For members of YouTube’s Partner Program (YPP), the Copyright Match tool is the primary vector for reporting violations. Copyright Match offers automated assistance in detecting copyright violations by identifying videos that match content uploaded by a partner, but the partner must take action to implement any kind of claim. Below this tier is the manual Webform that anyone can fill out to report a copyright violation. YouTube argues that abuse with the open Webform is “high,” while abuse through its more controlled and automated tools is comparatively low (Google, 2025). Importantly, however, most requests for video removals come through Webform; Content ID is instead primarily used to claim content, allowing the copyright holder to garnish the revenue generated by the content.

Content ID combines both regulatory and technological modes of governance, and has been adapted to comply with different copyright laws, including the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) in the United States (Gray, 2020) and Article 17 of the Directive on Copyright in the Digital Single Market in the European Union (Dergacheva and Katzenbach, 2024). Developing copyright management systems has been critical to establishing YouTube as a place where “the mass popularity of particular user-created videos and the uses of YouTube to distribute broadcast media content” combine to establish the platform’s role in “the public imagination” (Burgess and Green, 2013: 4) as the defining video website. Although Content ID has been instrumental in appeasing major rightsholders, such as international record labels and film studios, and preserving the economic viability of YouTube, the interests of content creators and their fans are less well represented (Gray, 2020). Despite the platform’s significant investment in its design and operation, YouTube’s copyright management system struggles with the messy nature of copyright law and the creativity of users (Sag, 2017) and may err toward over-regulating content (Dergacheva and Katzenbach, 2024). Accordingly, the enforcement of copyright shapes the conditions of cultural production on the platform and the opportunities available to independent creators (Cunningham and Craig, 2019), creating, at times, a chilling effect on creators’ willingness to upload content that could trigger possible copyright claims (Fiesler et al., 2023).

While regulation and technology unquestionably govern copyright on YouTube, social norms, or the “prevalent assumptions about legitimate and illegitimate behavior in a specific community or sector” (Katzenbach, 2018: 3), also play an important role. For one, the overwhelming majority of social media users do not read, let alone understand, the policies governing platform use (Obar and Oeldorf-Hirsch, 2020)—including terms related to intellectual property (IP). For another, content creators openly express frustrations with the automated governance of copyright on YouTube and develop strategies to evade “unfair” enforcement (Kaye and Gray, 2021). A recent study of “copyright callouts” suggests that creators and their fans have independent standards regarding the proper use of copyrighted material that only partially overlap with platform policies and copyright law, especially in genres like reaction and commentary videos (Hallinan et al., 2024). These “copynorms” (Schultz, 2007) merit further investigation within the broader governance of copyright on the platform. To provide a foundation for our investigation, we turn to a related line of research from fan studies that explores how fans establish alternative copyright norms that exist alongside and sometimes against copyright law.

Alternative copyright norms in fan communities

The creative outputs of fans, including fan art, fan fiction, and fan videos, have long strained the boundaries of copyright enforcement and created friction with legacy media industries (Stanfill, 2019). While some fans historically mitigated copyright risks by remaining underground and anonymous (Chidgey, 2006: 6), the rise of social media as a venue for distributing fanworks and the increased prominence of fandom in mainstream culture have made staying under the radar of copyright holders untenable. Fan interactions with copyright holders are overwhelmingly characterized by uncertainty around the boundaries of safe forms of fan engagement, compounded by the rarity of testing such boundaries in courts. Copyright cases infrequently go to trial in the United States; they are overwhelmingly litigated instead by what describes as “demand letter lawyering,” which uses letters from lawyers as “the opening salvo to a negotiated settlement” (35). But sending such letters to corporations with legal departments versus under-resourced fans carries very different implications. The latter tactic has been described as IP “bullying,” an attempt to over-aggressively press what may be thin legal claims under the belief that the other party is without the knowledge or resources to effectively challenge them (Gallagher, 2012: 8–9). Such power imbalances have made copyright a pressing matter of concern for fans and motivated the development of community practices to navigate copyright law.

Scholars have extensively analyzed how fan communities negotiate copyright law. In the early 2000s, legal scholars described the informal “copynorms” used to judge whether copying the works of others was permissible in the context of peer-to-peer file sharing (Schultz, 2007). Scholars have gone so far as to argue that fan communities have done a better job than the law itself in drawing practical “bright lines” around the use of copyrighted material, countering the chilling effects often created by legal uncertainty (Lantagne, 2016). Rebecca Tushnet (2008) has posited that, in function, “Fair use is the province of creators, not lawyers” because community norms that incentivize providing proper credit, compensation, and control “are much more powerful constraints than unpopular, confusing, and unevenly enforced positive laws” (101–102). These kinds of bright lines, or social norms, “are often the strongest, and arguably most important, in situations in which the law is unclear” (Fiesler and Bruckman, 2019: 2), and highlight how a “strong sense of community identity” is critical to developing “effective norm enforcement mechanisms” like public shaming (Fiesler and Bruckman, 2019: 20). These mechanisms are important not just for protecting individual fans, but for protecting the entire fan creative community from external action (Fiesler, 2008: 746). As such, the setting and enforcement of norms is one of the core functions of fan communities, yet remains relatively unexamined in the realm of platform governance.

The epistemic value of fan wikis

To construct an account of informal copyright governance on YouTube, we turned to Wikitubia, a fan wiki dedicated to the platform. Wikitubia was launched in 2007 and is hosted by Fandom, a commercial platform powered by MediaWiki, the same open-source software that Wikipedia runs on. The connection between Fandom and Wikipedia runs deeper than shared software; both entities were co-founded by Jimmy Wales. However, as a commercial platform, Fandom’s business model is predicated on a combination of advertising revenue and corporate partnerships to create “official” wikis for media properties. While many fan wikis are tied to traditional media properties like movies, TV shows, and video games, the genre also includes new media contexts like YouTube ¹ and niche fandoms like the Wiki Wiki, for people interested in the “nature of the wikiverse.” ² According to the company, Fandom hosts over 250,000 wikis spanning more than 40 million pages and 80 languages. ³ Like most instances of peer production, fan wikis are characterized by unequal levels of participation; the largest wikis on the platform have over 100,000 pages. Although Wikitubia is listed among the biggest English-language communities, it is notably smaller with around 20,000 pages, ⁴ of which a reported 99.3% cover individual YouTubers. ⁵

Researchers have made use of the documentary function of fan wikis to analyze distributed and ephemeral cultural objects like memes (Pettis, 2022) and 4chan (Peeters et al., 2021). For fan studies, the analytic function of wikis offers a “tremendous resource for scholars to observe a fan community reflecting on its own practices” (Mittell, 2009), including the dynamics of collaborative authorship (Hunter, 2011) and standards of expertise (Hills, 2015). Fan wikis also provide insight into points of cultural consensus and the recordkeeping practices of communities (Lee et al., 2025). Finally, the normative function of fan wikis provides a resource for examining cultural politics, including the “active criticism” of fellow fans on the wiki for the infamous LiveJournal community Fandom Wank (Dunlap and Wolf, 2010) and the “epistemic politics” of online alternative encyclopedias developed in response to the perceived biases of Wikipedia (De Keulenaar et al., 2019: 24).

To date, there is no research focused on Wikitubia or other fan wikis devoted to content creators, streamers, and influencers. However, the site is regularly invoked as a source of background information on particular YouTubers (Powell and Williams-Johnson, 2025) or to identify videos (Ameresekere et al., 2024) and channels (Shajari and Agarwal, 2025) that have been taken down or terminated from the platform. ⁶ In so doing, researchers make use of Wikitubia in a similar manner to Know Your Meme, turning to it as a record of the otherwise slippery dynamics of digital culture (Pettis, 2022). Drawing inspiration from Peeters and colleagues’ study of Encyclopedia Dramatica, we approached Wikituba as a “performative archive” that offers a “semi-stable companion for those wishing to be up-to-date with the latest subcultural vernacular and controversies” (Peeters et al., 2021: 4). We simultaneously investigated the contentious topic of copyright enforcement on YouTube, identifying how creators and their audiences understand, use, and evaluate copyright reporting tools, and the status of Wikitubia as an epistemic object, reflecting on its affordances and limitations for platform governance research.

Methods

Sadly, Wikitubia does not offer a readymade list of copyright enforcement controversies, nor lists of other topics relevant to platform governance. However, the wiki is predominantly textual and has built-in search functionality, making it possible for researchers to find relevant pages with relative ease. We created our comprehensive dataset of copyright issues documented on the English version of Wikitubia by conducting a keyword search for “copyright” and manually vetting each result. ⁷ To surface underlying copyright norms, we looked for incidents of copyright enforcement on YouTube that were in some way controversial or contested. This means that we excluded pages that mentioned copyright enforcement in other contexts, such as the page for WikiTree, an online genealogy website with a YouTube channel and an honor code that encourages “consideration of copyright and respect for the privacy of others.” ⁸ We also excluded pages that lacked an evaluation of copyright enforcement, which we identified through terms such as “copyright abuse,” “false copyright,” and the YouTube-native term “copystrike” often invoked in disputes among creators, as well as hedging language like “allegedly.” For each result, we opened the page, searched for the word “copyright,” and read the surrounding text to determine relevance. Through this process, we identified 149 incidents documented across 168 pages. Some incidents, especially those involving high-profile creators, were documented on multiple pages.

In line with Wikitubia’s primary focus on creators, all of the copyright controversies we identified appeared on pages for individual YouTube channels. We assigned each incident a code and manually collected the following information about the creator and channel: name, nationality, location, type of channel (e.g., gaming, commentary), and number of subscribers. We also recorded the presence of any quality warnings on the page (citations needed, outdated, biased, more info needed, article incomplete). Two authors independently read the sections involving copyright on the page for each wiki and proceeded to write a summary of the incident. We then combined the details from both authors, resulting in descriptions that named the actors and described the incident: for example, “YMS made a video ‘Cool Cat Learns Fair Use’ where they criticized another creator for unfairly copyright striking I Hate Everything's Cool Cat review.” During the process, we realized that some wiki pages had already changed from our initial data collection 3 months earlier and no longer contained discussions of copyright. We resolved this problem by reverting the wiki pages to the versions active at the time of collection.

Based on our initial reading and summaries of the incidents, we developed a codebook to analyze how Wikitubia contributors describe copyright enforcement, platforms, and power. The codebook contained questions about who filed the copyright claim, their role (creator, corporation, fan, other), the target of the claim, and the year of the dispute. We also coded the claimant’s purported reason for filing a copyright claim, how the wiki indicated the claim was (il)legitimate, and the types of evidence invoked. We included direct quotes from the wiki addressing the legitimacy of copyright enforcement. For example, the entry on YMS referenced above included the following quote: “the video by I Hate Everything was taken down and Alex's channel was given a strike for copyright infringement by the movie’s creator Derek Savage, despite the videos correctly falling under fair use law,” which signals the illegitimacy of the copyright claim by noting that the video “correctly” fell under fair use. Finally, we noted how, if at all, the wiki entry discussed copyright law. Two authors independently coded the entire dataset and met to combine their results and resolve any disagreements, following the principles of consensual qualitative research (Hill et al., 1997). During that meeting, we further classified the controversies into four primary types: political, economic, interpersonal, and infrastructural, discussed below.

Wikitubia’s alternative account of copyright governance

As an “unofficial YouTube wiki run by fans,” Wikitubia is not intended to provide a comprehensive record of copyright enforcement on the platform. ⁹ Yet the rise of social media has expanded the public relevance of copyright, moving it out of the “exclusive domain of corporate lawyers and policymakers” (Gillespie, 2007: 5). With YouTubers publicly discussing their experiences with copyright enforcement and even appealing to their audiences for assistance (Hallinan et al., 2024; Kaye and Gray, 2021), copyright has also become a problem for fans. Wikitubia’s account of the copyright problem is thus a partisan one. The perspective documented across Wikitubia’s pages emerges from the interplay of the structure of the wiki in terms of both design and policy, the efforts of contributors, and the moderating force of other editors and site administrators. In what follows, we present the wiki’s account of copyright governance and contrast it with the official account offered by YouTube. We then reflect on the affordances and limitations of Wikitubia as a source for platform governance research, focusing on the demographic composition of the creators included in our dataset, the evidentiary practices of contributors, and the temporal dynamics of wikis.

According to Wikitubia, issues around copyright enforcement are primarily internal to YouTube’s culture. Over 60% of all incidents involved creators filing manual copyright claims against other creators. YouTubers thus appear as both targets and perpetrators of copyright abuse, fighting and filing unfair claims against ideological opponents, economic rivals, and even former friends. However, creators were not the only actors described in copyright enforcement. Corporations were named in 15% of controversies, typically involving video game companies or animation studios in conflict with YouTubers who make “let’s play” videos or reviews. For example, Totally Not Mark, a YouTuber known for making anime analysis videos, went public about receiving a copyright strike from studio Toei Animation despite claiming “fair use” for his use of anime clips, one of the few instances of a copyright strike issued through automated systems in our dataset. Record labels like Sony and Space Shower Music also appeared as antagonists in a few disputes, and some creators inferred what the likely copyright claim was about based on the claimant, like HowToBasic’s strike from US-based radio and TV station KQED, which wiki contributors stated to be “most likely because of the music used.” In addition to creators and corporations, fans occasionally made an appearance as relevant actors, filing copyright claims on behalf of a favored creator or targeting a formerly favored creator when the relationship soured. In a particularly extreme case, notable for being litigated in front of the Intellectual Property Enterprise Court (IPEC) in the United Kingdom, a viewer emailed content creator DissociaDID with suggested changes to the disclaimer she used on videos, as well as offering further collaboration. When the parties had a falling out, former fan Sergio Costa began mass-claiming videos that used the modified disclaimer, resulting in dozens of removals by YouTube. The IPEC ultimately ruled that the fan was not a co-author of the disclaimer and the takedowns were invalid. ¹⁰ Wikitubia’s account of this situation expands on the interpersonal concerns as much as the legal results (which were merely noted as “ongoing” and have not been updated), asserting that legal action was preceded by circumstances where “[Costa] began to ask for affection from [creator] Nin and became aggressive when refused.” Actors external to the platform’s culture, such as extortionists and “copytrolls,” only rarely appeared in the wiki’s account, even as these are an established problem for “copyfraud” (Mazzone, 2011) and have been publicly discussed by YouTubers (Hallinan et al., 2024; Kaye and Gray, 2021) and sued by YouTube itself (Hale, 2019).

Even if, as Katzenbach (2018) rightly argues, there is “always more than law” in copyright governance, the topic was surprisingly marginal in Wikitubia’s account. Working from a very broad understanding of copyright law that included any mention of (il)legality, IP, lawyers, lawsuits, or fair use, only 23% of copyright controversies contained a reference to law. Further, as shown in the example of DissociaDID, many mentions were quite thin, even in cases where substantial litigation was taking place. References typically involved vague invocations of fair use or, less often, the threat of a lawsuit. Exemplifying the former, the wiki’s discussion of the dispute between Dumpy and Brett Rivera concluded that YouTube ruled in Dumpy’s favor, resulting in “backlash by Rivera’s critics that called him out for abusing YouTube’s copyright takedown system despite these videos falling under fair use.” Nowhere does the entry describe the content of the videos, their use of copyrighted materials, or the basis for claiming fair use. The ambiguous discussion of law on the wiki makes it difficult to determine the specific copyright laws involved. The U.S. DMCA was directly invoked a handful of times, and there were two references to the greater restrictiveness of Japanese copyright law; no other laws were named directly. Notably, the European Union’s Directive on Copyright in the Digital Single Market did not appear in our dataset, despite its impact on YouTube’s content moderation practices and the company’s attempts to get creators and users to protest its passage (Dergacheva and Katzenbach, 2024). YouTube’s copyright problem, according to fans, is only occasionally or incidentally a legal problem.

With the law playing a minor role in understanding and evaluating copyright enforcement, Wikitubia entries present alternative criteria to determine the legitimacy of copyright claims. However, such criteria were rarely made explicit. While pages effectively conveyed the illegitimacy of copyright claims, describing them as false, fake, or abusive, the reasoning behind these judgments was often opaque. Like other self-reports of false or abusive content moderation (e.g., Myers West, 2018), the accounts of copyright enforcement on Wikitubia also lack the necessary information to evaluate the legitimacy of the incidents with respect to YouTube’s policies or relevant copyright laws. Still, the wiki offers some insight into the evaluative criteria of fans. One factor that cut across copyright incidents was the size of the accounts involved, meaning that it matters whether a channel “strikes up” or “strikes down.” Striking up, or issuing copyright claims against channels or corporations with larger audiences, and presumably greater access to financial and legal resources, is considered more legitimate than striking down. Creators targeting smaller channels or corporations striking big channels violate fan sensibilities of fairness. Elisocray, a creator with over 1 million subscribers, was subject to particular criticism for “inflicting” a “false copyright strike on a channel with less than 100 subscribers.” Nowhere does the wiki concern itself with explaining what the strike was about or why it was considered false. Channel size was repeatedly tied to different standards of behavior, with larger channels expected to follow stricter guidelines. Discussions of striking up/down echo some of the legal talk of IP bullying, with one notable difference: IP bullying relies on pressing dubious claims under the belief that the other party cannot or will not challenge them. By contrast, striking down is framed as illegitimate even if—perhaps especially if—the claimant has valid legal grounds. Wikitubia thus forefronts an ethics of copyright where the law is secondary to community norms.

Beyond the size of the accounts, fans typically evaluated the legitimacy of copyright enforcement according to the intentions of the claimant and the moral status of the target. Both of these factors are reflected in our typology of controversies, which we sorted into political, economic, interpersonal, and infrastructural (see Table 1). Political controversies, defined as ideological disputes around the boundaries of acceptable speech, were the most frequent (33%). For example, Colombian livestreamer Alinity was accused of falsely “copystriking” a video where PewDiePie called her a “thot.” The use of copyright reporting tools to navigate gendered politics appeared in a few incidents, including a high-profile dispute between Akilah Obviously and Sargon of Akkad that took place during Gamergate, wherein Akilah issued a copyright strike against Sargon for using one of her clips in a video mocking and critiquing her (and which a US Circuit Court judge determined to be sufficiently fair use). Most political controversies were less specific, featuring vague references to censorship, especially as a means to suppress criticism between creators. In a particularly protracted and high-profile example, YouTuber QuantumTV was accused of falsely striking a multitude of channels that criticized his take on the popular video game Elden Ring. YouTuber The Act Man made several lengthy videos detailing this behavior and framed it as an attempt to suppress fair use. Such claims exploit the notoriously evasive meaning of censorship, a term that appears frequently in disputes over platform content moderation (Reynolds and Hallinan, 2024). In the case of copyright issues, concerns with censorship foreground the actions of creators who use copyright reporting tools to restrict speech. In so doing, the incidents do not necessarily have intrinsic connections to IP so much as take advantage of the strong tools for reporting copyright infringement on platforms, which is governed by stricter legal frameworks that require greater transparency in reporting and harsher consequences for violations (Gray, 2020). The willingness to justify copyright strikes was thus especially common on wiki pages for creators whose morality violated community standards, while for those in better community standing, the use of material that might strain the boundaries of copyright law was given more leeway. The accounts of controversies also differed in framing depending on which creator’s page they were on; for example, on QuantumTV’s page, the account of his controversy with The Act Man is labeled as “Feud with The Act Man.” On The Act Man’s page, many of the same details appear but are instead labeled under the section “False Copyright Strikes.” These differences reflect the partisan takes of fans not just toward copyright as a system, but toward particular creators involved in a copyright controversy.

Table 1.

Types of YouTube copyright controversies documented in Wikitubia.

Controversy type	Definition	Example
Political	Ideological disputes around the boundaries of acceptable speech	A creator “copystrikes” a video containing criticism in order to get it taken down
Economic	Disputes over money, merit, and the working conditions of content creation	A voice actor reports a video for copyright infringement when the creator fails to pay for the work
Interpersonal	Conflict in a friendship, romantic relationship, or fandom	Two creators have a feud and retaliate by striking each other’s videos
Infrastructural	Problems involving ContentID or other technical aspects of copyright enforcement	A creator strikes videos suggested by the Copyright Match tool without verifying the content

Economic controversies, defined as disputes over money, merit, and working conditions of content creation, comprised 24% of our sample. These disputes were typically between corporations and creators, or creators and independent contractors who edit videos, make animations, or provide voice acting services. Occasionally, intermediary organizations like multi-channel networks were involved, managing IP on behalf of creators and operating as part of YouTube’s larger push to professionalize content creation (Lobato, 2016). As Lobato (2016) notes, YouTube’s ethic in the first few years following its founding was highly DIY and positioned its corporate image as that of the “upstart outsider” (348), but by 2016, the platform had entered the realm of mainstream cultural production. The collective involvement of collaborators, administrators, and moderators further reflects the professionalization of social media entertainment from its early amateur and hobbyist origins (Burgess and Green, 2013; Cunningham and Craig, 2019). For example, Filipino animation channel MickeyMario64 reportedly had a video copyright claimed by a voice actor who hadn’t been paid, a strategy used by other contractors to secure compensation for their work. Such dynamics highlight a labor issue rarely addressed in the field (for a notable exception, see Barbetta, 2022). Similarly, a few creators were criticized for using a Digital Rights Management company to license clips of their videos, a practice that disrupts longstanding but contested practices of reaction and commentary videos. Indeed, the wiki pages for multiple creators, including high-profile figures like xQc and penguinz0, noted the potentially risky “gray area” that reaction videos present in terms of copyright, while smaller channels like Vilu expressed open concern that reactions to larger or more controversial channels could become a vector for strikes. Finally, the copyright claims of large corporate rightsholders largely fell under the category of economic disputes, even as fans delegitimized the economic interests of corporations as driven by greed and predicated on the denial of fair use.

Interpersonal controversies, defined as conflict in a friendship, romantic relationship, or fandom, comprised 16% of our sample. For example, Indian channel BADMASH icON reportedly received multiple copyright strikes from peers as part of a “prank.” While smaller than the previous two categories, interpersonal controversies represent a very individualized kind of antagonism that contrasts with what is often perceived as the impersonal nature of copyright claims by big corporations (Ginsburg, 2002). In addition, this category featured multiple accusations of copyright strikes as a means to achieve ends unrelated to the protection of IP. Because copyright is a legal matter, even if creators and fans do not necessarily talk about it as such, the process of disputing a claim is a legal procedure that requires the targeted party to disclose personally identifiable information, including legal name, address, and phone number. Some of the copyright issues documented on Wikitubia involved the use of copyright claims to access personal information, described as a form of “self-doxxing.” The Wikitubia page for Chazington, for example, noted that the creator did not want to fight false copyright strikes from fellow creator Smash Bandicoot because doing so would require him to reveal personal information that could be used for further harassment. In other cases, the copyright strike was used to bully other creators, a move that fans found particularly concerning in cases where there was an imbalance of power between bigger and smaller creators. Finally, abuse stemming from audience members involved in parasocial relationships with creators, such as the case of Costa and DissociaDID detailed previously, was a rare but interesting outlier in the record that stretches the boundaries of interpersonal ties.

Infrastructural controversies, defined as problems involving Content ID or other technical aspects of YouTube’s copyright system, appeared in a mere 3% of our sample. This is the area where Wikitubia’s account of the copyright problem most clearly diverges from the company’s own reporting. Indeed, there is a massive disparity between wiki attention and Content ID’s operational role in the YouTube ecosystem, with YouTube claiming that over 99% of copyright claims are made automatically through Content ID, and fewer than 0.6% of these claims are challenged, almost half the rate of challenges for manual reports (Google, 2025). As such, our findings deal with a very small portion of YouTube copyright challenges, which number over 2.2 billion per year. However, most of these challenges take place behind-the-scenes, and are automated, uncontested, and invisible to viewers. Accordingly, our dataset allows us to peer at an informative set of outliers in the copyright enforcement system: those that are human-initiated and generate public controversy.

Wikitubia’s account of copyright governance is shaped by the fan wiki’s own practices of platform governance. The wiki promotes a set of standards, epitomized by their “Facts Policy.” Similar to the “neutral point of view” standard on Wikipedia (Matei and Dobrescu, 2011), Wikitubia’s Facts Policy stipulates that “personal opinion should not be used on wiki articles.” ¹¹ According to the policy, reputable sources include “reliable” news outlets, as well as YouTube channels, YouTube videos, and the social media profiles of YouTubers, substantially aligning the Wikitubia project with the perspectives of content creators. While Wikitubia leadership lays out an optimistic vision of professional norms, the coordination of amateur contributors often goes in different directions. The difficulties of ensuring that wiki entries follow these norms are reflected in the high number of quality warnings on the pages in our dataset. Indeed, only 10% of the pages contained no quality warnings, while all other pages contained at least one. ¹² “Citations needed” was the most frequent (83%), followed by “Cleanup required” (11%) and “Article incomplete” (10%). The remaining warnings appeared on fewer than 5% of pages: “Biased,” “Outdated,” and “Needs more information.”

On the one hand, the frequency of quality warnings provides evidence of active moderation on the platform. Wiki entries are consistently flagged for improvement. On the other hand, their frequency also suggests a significant gap between promise and practice. Contributors Wikitubia’s expectations for article quality to any significant degree, especially when it comes to the use of citations. Such issues also contribute to the dynamism of the wiki, with entries subject to frequent revisions from contributors and moderators. ¹³ We did not, however, further explore the context of these warning labels, including how old they were or if warnings had existed on pages previously but had been resolved. This was, in part, because the ongoing existence of quality warnings seemed to have little influence on fan practices, as the articles we examined consistently made vague or lightly sourced references to the controversies they reported, and in part because there was ambiguity around what earned an article such a label. Importantly, however, whether the fan edits met the quality standards of the wiki or, indeed, provided accurate reporting on the highlighted copyright controversies is not our primary interest. Rather, our focus is on the normative boundaries that fans establish through their decisions on what they record and how they frame incidents, even if these claims do not hold up to editorial scrutiny.

Beyond matters of evidence and article quality, Wikitubia’s record of copyright enforcement is shaped by the interests of contributors. While Wikitubia’s account of copyright frames it as a problem that crosses geographic borders, the origins of the creators on the English version of the wiki are not evenly distributed (see Figure 1). Almost half of the controversies involved creators based in the United States, followed by the United Kingdom, Canada, and Australia. There were only six creators based in India, the country responsible for the largest share of YouTube viewers (Ceci, 2025). Although the popularity of the United States may be slightly overstated, given that creators from other countries sometimes say they are based in the United States in the hopes of being recommended to a broader and potentially wealthier audience (Bidav and Mehta, 2024), the creators in our dataset are a highly selective subset of YouTube’s userbase. This selectivity is even further pronounced for non-Anglophone contexts. Caveats aside, our dataset makes it clear that fans do not think of copyright problems on YouTube as the exclusive property of a national or supranational copyright regime, similar to the more general perspectives on copyright among content creators (Dergacheva and Katzenbach, 2023). The dearth of references to the law and the near exclusive focus on American principles of fair use demonstrate a general disinterest in the specifics of copyright law. That is, fans as a collective are aware of copyright law, as their extensive communal history in avoiding and subverting it demonstrates, but primarily engage with an alternative system of community-developed ethics to determine the validity of using copyright reporting tools. For fans, copyright presents less as a legal question and instead as an infrastructural or systemic-level problem, with YouTube criticized for failing to properly evaluate copyright claims and wiki writers largely either unaware of or disinterested in the platform’s legal basis for avoiding such determinations, or as a human-based problem, with false claims driven by interpersonal bickering, economic disputes, or political rivalries. In general, for fans, the problem of copyright abuse seems to overlap with the act of making of copyright claims at all—that is, there are many pages that refer to false and controversial claims, and almost none that support the use of copyright flagging as an appropriate intra-creator norm.

Figure 1.

Geographic distribution of YouTube accounts involved in copyright-related incidents on Wikitubia.

The problem of copyright becomes slightly more diverse regarding the genre and size of the channels involved. In terms of genre, the largest share of accounts are gaming channels, followed by commentary, comedy, animation, and variety (see Figure 2). The remaining half of the channels make news, tech reviews, mukbang, educational, and ASMR (autonomous sensory meridian response) content, among others. In terms of size, the dataset skews toward larger channels, with over 35% of channels having more than 1 million subscribers (see Figure 3). Still, compared with the top-heavy distribution of audiences on YouTube (Rieder et al., 2020), our dataset has a stronger representation of medium and small channels than would be expected. Wikitubia sets a minimum number of subscribers (1000) for a creator to be included in the wiki, although a quick search of Minitubia, the sister wiki for YouTubers with fewer than 1000 subscribers, demonstrates that copyright issues are also salient to the fans of very small YouTube channels. ¹⁴ Finally, although Wikitubia has been active since 2007 ¹⁵ and the first copyright incident comes from the same year involving the “false termination” of a YouTube channel devoted to the media property Thomas the Tank Engine, ¹⁶ most incidents cluster between 2020 and 2023. This cluster also aligns with a notable change in branding for the fan wiki system, which was called Wikia until 2019 and then renamed Fandom.com. The timeline also accords with the Wiki Wiki’s history of Wikitubia, which notes that the site was largely dormant until around 2012 and did not reach wider popularity among YouTube fans until late 2019 when popular YouTuber JackSucksAtLife began to make videos about it. ¹⁷ Accordingly, our dataset reflects a recency bias in terms of reporting on copyright incidents that aligns with the uptake of the wiki as a more popular site for fan documentation practices.

Figure 2.

Genre distribution of YouTube accounts involved in copyright-related incidents on Wikitubia.

Figure 3.

Channel size distribution of YouTube accounts involved in copyright-related incidents on Wikitubia.

In documenting community concerns with copyright, Wikitubia offers a necessarily partisan perspective, complementing the limitations of other reports on copyright enforcement, including the corporate interests driving voluntary transparency reports (Zalnieriute, 2021), the epistemic biases built into the structure of platform Application Programming Interfaces (John and Nissenbaum, 2019), and the gaps in the data available to independent research projects like Lumen (Urban et al., 2016). YouTube’s transparency reports on the use of its copyright enforcement systems acknowledge the potential for “invalid requests and abuse” that “can cause significant disruptions to all members of the YouTube ecosystem” (Google, 2025). Abuse of copyright reporting tools indicates the existence of alternative standards and purposes for their use outside of YouTube’s official guidelines and highlights the gap between the intended and actual functions of such tools. However, YouTube’s transparency reports work in the aggregate, providing an ecosystem-level summary of copyright reporting on the platform that fails to detail specific cases of either proper use or abuse, making it difficult to understand what drives people to use copyright tools inappropriately—or to avoid using them even when appropriate. While YouTube’s copyright system was created on the back of legal and practical necessity, users’ perceptions of what such tools are actually for, and what constitutes misuse of them, indicate that they are mechanisms of social norms as well as legal enforcement.

Fan Wikis as informal platform governance

Wikitubia offers a highly normative account of copyright governance bound up in personal identity, social interaction, political expression, and economic worth. In line with previous research, we find that copyright reporting is sometimes employed as a tool of harassment (Fiesler et al., 2023) and image management. However, it also functions as a form of political expression, a bid for public sympathy, and a convenient excuse when videos or accounts are taken down. The cultural understandings of copyright expressed on Wikitubia present a relatively autonomous vision of copyright abuse and the appropriate use of platform reporting tools, with only marginal ties to platform policy or copyright law. Although some arguments reflect the judicial tests of fair use commonly invoked in U.S. copyright law, user interpretations of these factors do not consistently align with judicial interpretations (Fiesler et al., 2023). Wiki contributors invoke the size of channels, the accuracy of claims, and ethical criteria related to the target’s conduct, with some arguing that “groomers” or “harassers” do not deserve copyright protection. Positive attitudes toward the target also lead contributors to excuse overt, even flagrant, copyright violations. Our examination of Wikitubia through a focus on fans’ reporting about copyright issues offers insight into what fans deem as relevant information and the ethical lenses they call upon during this reporting, providing a useful comparison to more formal accounts of platform copyright actions, such as transparency reports. Importantly, because of its dynamism and frequent editorial disputes, Wikitubia often serves less as a record of notable incidents than as a space of opinionated norm-setting—a cooptation by fans inasmuch as this directly contradicts its policies, yet a very real dynamic that plays out across the pages in our dataset, making it clear that the agendas of fan wiki editors and contributors do not always align.

For YouTube, copyright management systems are both a legal and functional requirement. Yet, for creators, there is significant space for negotiating how and when to call upon these systems. The more public and controversial creators’ invocations of copyright protections are, the more likely fans are to have and express opinions about those uses. As a result, fans become part of an informal process of norm-setting that helps to collectively adjudicate the appropriateness of claims, regardless of their legality. While corporations largely do not care about the opinions of YouTube fans, creators must balance the value of winning a claim versus the potential reputational backlash of violating norms. As we note in the “Introduction,” platform governance is often analyzed through the lenses of governance of platforms, governance by platforms, and governance through platforms. From these perspectives, the way that creators operate is often contextualized solely or primarily through what platforms allow. In our examination of Wikitubia copyright controversies, we approach the pressure on creators to make particular choices about their content and conduct from another angle. Namely, what do fans allow? Although lacking the kinds of top-down power and extensive policy- and feature-based enforcement systems of platforms, we argue that through informal routes of norm-setting and documentary practices that highlight norm violations, fans also govern creator culture.

This is, quite evidently, a narrow space of governance, especially when compared against the total volume of copyright issues on YouTube (or any content platform) as a whole. It is further narrowed by the self-selection of fans who are willing to engage in documentary practices on a fan wiki, which likely follows a similar “pipeline of participation” as Wikipedia contributors (Shaw and Hargittai, 2018). But the sheer volume of participation is not necessarily the guiding measure here. As previous research on creator strategies for pressuring platforms has shown, “making noise” is a critical way to elevate minority concerns to a place of prominence, where it becomes more beneficial for a platform (or creator) to respond to than ignore a vocal minority (Reynolds and Hallinan, 2024). Fan practices of documenting copyright controversy, often with quite implicit or explicit normative valences attached, therefore represent one of the processes by which, as Jurg et al. (2025) frame it, “influencers are influenced by their audiences” (70). Fans’ repeated attempts to use Wikitubia to support or chastise creators, regardless of its editorial vision and attempts to counteract opinion-based additions, highlight it as a place public enough to be worth contesting. This is a strategic choice by fans. Rather than primarily appealing to the operations of copyright law, fans approach platform governance from a place in which they feel, structurally and historically, that their input makes a meaningful difference: by publicly exerting pressure on the norms governing behavior in creative communities. Appealing to the law or to platform policies risks legitimizing systems that fans do not agree with (see Hallinan et al., 2025a) and is a strategy through which achieving substantive change is a long and difficult process. Fans thus focus on smaller, more affectable routes of change, like building community norms and pressuring individual creators who violate them. To be documented on the wiki as the progenitor of controversy or antisocial community practices is not just a neutral documentation of facts—in fact, it is rarely that—but rather a form of public shaming.

Cases on the human-driven edges of copyright enforcement, like those covered on Wikitubia, tell us about the space outside of YouTube’s and the law’s control over copyright—the realm of formal platform governance. Fans operate instead within a realm of informal platform governance that is invested in shaping norms rather than crafting rules, where punishments generally come in the form of a loss of social support or public shaming rather than account strikes. Fan reporting of copyright disputes on Wikitubia demonstrates a belief that not all copyright claims are created equal, and that some uses of copyright systems are particularly harmful to creative communities. By iteratively building and reinforcing social norms around copyright reporting, fans informally intervene in platform governance. In the case of copyright, fans employ a different framework of copyright than the law, one driven by these collectively constructed norms about when and how the use of copyright tools is appropriate. These norms are not motivated (solely) by a disregard for the legal or moral role of copyright, but by an understanding of the strength of copyright as a tool of platform governance. There is always more than the law in analyzing copyright disputes (Katzenbach, 2018), but the law remains very much a looming threat. Copyright strikes are the “nuclear option” of the YouTube governance system, and, as such, are policed within the community with uncommon fervor, in line with longstanding fan practices of alternative copyright norms that are meant to protect fan communities from external legal action. In documenting human-driven and often creator-to-creator copyright battles on Wikitubia, fans seek to protect creators from intra-communal legal action. As Soha and McDowell (2016) note in their defense of an idea of “fair(er) use,” fans recognize the importance of “the creative labor of content creators” (8) in constructing what they watch and wish to protect this labor not only from corporations, but from larger creators or creators perceived as immoral. Thus, they create communal standards driven not by the law, but by norms that seek to maximize creative potential and construct an ethical body politic. Informal platform governance, like that undertaken by fans on Wikitubia, thus constitutes a semi-autonomous sphere of governance with distinct actors, values, and practices that can simultaneously complement and challenge mainstream approaches to platform governance.

Our research demonstrates that fan wikis present rich sites for research, and we have developed only a narrow band of this potential through our study of copyright controversies. While we focus on Wikitubia, fan wikis have exploded in popularity across diverse media properties and celebrities, and could be used to derive similar insights about how fans construct norms within these communities. Future directions for research could also focus on the dynamics of the quality warnings we noted in our findings. While we took a snapshot view of Wikitubia pages, using quality warnings as general indicators of information dynamics on Wikitubia rather than as markers of specific controversies about information quality, doing so offers a promising direction for better understanding the information politics and hierarchical moderation of fan wikis. Alongside this, edit histories and talk pages also provide a detailed record of how practices of documentation on the wiki have themselves evolved. A related direction may lie in the boundaries of what is considered notable information, or notable creators, deserving of words on the wiki. As YouTube, and Wikitubia, have grown in popularity, so too have the requirements for having a page on the fan wiki. The governance of the wiki itself may offer parallel insights into how governance on YouTube has balanced the formal and informal throughout the site’s history.