YouTube Removes the Video Where Vic Berger Reveals FuckJerry’s Utter Lack of Creativity

By Garrett Martin  |  February 6, 2019 | 11:15am
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YouTube Removes the Video Where Vic Berger Reveals FuckJerry’s Utter Lack of Creativity

The #FuckFuckJerry campaign continues to peel followers off the FuckJerry Instagram account, in what amounts to a massive rebalancing of the universe’s karmic scale. Basically these social media nerds stole content from comedians for years, cropping off the creators’ names and giving them no credit while monetizing it into a fortune. Megh Wright of Splitsider and Vulture started a movement in January when she noticed that Comedy Central was advertising through FuckJerry, effective paying the folks behind the account to steal material from the type of comedians who often work on and star in Comedy Central shows. #FuckFuckJerry was born, hashtag and everything, and since then Wright and a surging number of colleagues have convinced prominent comedians, celebrities and regular folk to unfollow FuckJerry en masse. It is one of the few good things happening in the world right now, and it’s driven FuckJerry to finally start giving credit to the memes and jokes it aggregates. Of course that doesn’t change the fact that they’re still selling expensive sponsored posts using other people’s work.

This isn’t a recap of #FuckFuckJerry though—you can more about that here. Instead we’re here today to talk about a specific piece of agitprop released in the #FuckFuckJerry onslaught, from the genius editor and comedian Vic Berger. In typical Berger fashion, he edits together various interviews and fawning news magazine features on FuckJerry and its founder Elliot Tabele, using Tabele’s own words and actions to paint a portrait of a terminally unfunny man with zero creative skills who runs a company that (until the last week or two) reacted with hostility when a comedian pointed out their content theft. For anybody who’s followed the FuckJerry debacle, and felt grossed out by their shameless opportunism for the last several years, it is extremely satisfying to watch this thing. FuckJerry isn’t some genius content creator or hilarious online comedian—it’s a bunch of bean-counting middlemen who know how to best profit off the work of others. If you haven’t yet, unfollow the hell out of their accounts.

BUT WAIT: After this post was written and sat unpublished for like a week, Berger revealed that FuckJerry’s collection of creatively bankrupt, joke-stealing marketing majors had gotten his video pulled off YouTube through copyright takedown request. Yes, the people who made their fame off the work of uncredited others (and who basically told Berger to get lost when he privately confronted them about stealing his work) have used YouTube’s copyright policy to nuke Berger’s piece of critical satire, which clearly meets the transformative standards of fair use. In return Berger has made the video freely downloadable and is asking people to upload it to as many video streaming services as possible.

 
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