 Hello everybody, HoodedCoverCommander788 here, and this is my top video. This is the only video I will make on the subject. This channel does not do videos on legal topics. This channel does videos on vintage GI Joe toys. So I'm going to try to keep it to that. This video is going to be unedited, it's going to be probably too long and too boring. I'm just sitting here in front of the camera, I've got my laptop here with my notes. I'm not even going to fix the lights, I'm just going to sit here and talk with you guys about this subject. People have been worried about YouTube's settlement with the FTC, and the FTC's enforcement of the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act, or COPPA. COPPA is not new, it's been around for a long time. They didn't just suddenly pass a law, we've all already been subject to COPPA. But there's been a lot of misinformation out there. Even from some channels that specifically cover legal topics, they've also spread misinformation. And I don't want this channel to be another source of misinformation. So I'm going to be very careful about what I say and how I say it. Honestly, some channels have scared you, I think they've scared you intentionally. They've talked about this $42,000 fine from the FTC per video, per violation. Each video that violates could be subject to $42,000 they've told you. And if that's the information you've got, you understandably been pretty worked up about it. But I feel like those channels that have done that have done it for views, for sensationalism, and basically to make a profit on your fear. So for that reason, I'm going to go the opposite direction with this video. It's going to be as boring as possible. I'm not editing anything. You're getting all of my pauses, all of my stutters, all of it. I will put up a boring text thumbnail graphic to make this as dull as possible. Because I do not want to contribute to the sensationalism that has surrounded this topic. So let's talk about what the issues are. First of all, I'm not interested in laying blame right now. People have been wanting to blame YouTube. They want to blame the FTC. They want to blame everybody. I don't care who's to blame. What I care about is whether my content is in compliance with the law. What I care about is, am I going to have to defend my content in court? That's what I care about. So yes, there's plenty of blame to go around, but that's less important right now than making sure that this channel can go forward and continue to produce the content that we've been doing for several years. Let's talk about a brief history, very brief history of COPPA and the YouTube settlement with the FTC. COPPA is a statute that's been around for I believe about 19 years. The FTC is charged with promulgating rules, regulations to enforce the statute. The regulations are updated every 10 years, but the last round was early. It was updated in 2013, but COPPA is not new. The regulations enforcing COPPA are not new. The short version of what COPPA does is it prohibits the gathering of personal information of children under the age of 13 without their parent's permission. That's the core of what it does. In the enforcement of that, the FTC has had to try to figure out how you determine whether the audience on an internet site like YouTube is under 13 or not. What they are looking at is whether the content is directed at children. They have a number of factors that they apply to determine whether or not it is. For a content creator, like this channel, we are held to a strict liability standard, meaning that our intent to create this content and get that personal information is not relevant. If we've made children's content, we know that we have. It's a different standard for the website operator like YouTube. They are required to have actual knowledge, but for us, the content creator is strict liability. YouTube got busted. They tried to get around the statute by prohibiting anyone under the age of 13 from using the website. When you sign up, you'd have to confirm that you are over the age of 13. In response to Compa, they said, we have nobody under the age of 13 on the website. The problem was YouTube knew that wasn't true. They marketed the content to toy companies and touted the fact that they have all of these kids watching the website. YouTube had actual knowledge that there was children's content on their website, and just having children's content on the website is not the problem. The problem is they also got personal information from the viewers who they knew were children and then used that information to target ads at those children. That's what's against the law. Their own documentation was the evidence against them. They knew they were doing it, and they even advertised that they were doing it. So that was a pretty easy win for the FTC. FTC filed a complaint. YouTube was caught red-handed. They settled for a very large sum of money. And then, as I'm sure you are aware now, if you make content on YouTube, YouTube has implemented a few changes, some that they were required to make and others that they have done voluntarily. One thing that they were required to do is create a system in which content creators could flag their content as either for kids or not for kids. They've already done that. And on my channel, I flagged my entire channel as not for kids. And I'm sticking with that choice for the reasons that I will explain in this video. The other thing that YouTube has done is they have deployed an algorithm to find content that is not flagged for children, but it should be. And they are automatically flagging that as for children. Any content that is so flagged will have some of their features switched off. Comments will be switched off. Notifications will be switched off. A few other things will be switched off. And YouTube cannot gather personal information on those videos for which they would target advertising. So there may still be advertisements on those videos, but they will be general advertisements and they tend to make less money. So if you're depending on YouTube ad revenue for income, to have a lot of your videos flagged as for children, it will cut your income by quite a bit. A lot of us thought that was the main issue when we were looking at this the first time. And YouTube deployed their algorithm and found that none of my videos were for kids. Zero. Zero. And I agree with that. This channel has never been for kids. All of the content on this channel is related to vintage GI Joe stuff. Everybody who knows that stuff is over the age of 13. And I don't really do anything in the videos that directly appeals to children. So I agreed with their assessment and yeah, I don't make videos for kids. I never have. So that ought to have been it, right? That should have been the conclusion. But then certain content creators started sounding the alarm about these $42,000 fines from the FTC to content creators, to channel owners for every single violation that the FTC finds when they have kids content that is not flagged as kids content and still gathers that personal information. Really, YouTube gathers the personal information, but the way the FTC is looking at it is YouTube is gathering the personal information on your behalf to target those ads on your behalf for which you get some of the revenue. So yeah, that's really scary, right? Who can afford $42,000 per video? I have hundreds of videos up on YouTube. Well, what if the FTC decided that all of those videos were for kids? There's no way I could pay that fine. That's the end of everything, right? So there was a lot of fear about that. So obviously that should wake people up. If somebody starts saying you're going to be fine $42,000 a video, you should probably pay attention to look into it a bit. So I've been looking into it a bit. I'm going to talk about the steps that I took to make sure I understood this topic better. One thing that I didn't do was start running around like my hair's on fire, waving my hands in the air and participating in this frenzy, this panic. It has been a panic. Some people have already decided that they're going to shut their channels down because they just can't risk it, right? It doesn't matter if the risk is low, they can't risk it at all because even if one or two videos were to be hit with this fine, this $42,000 fine, that would be sunk. I have a lot of sympathy for people who were concerned about that. I don't know what kind of content you create on YouTube. I don't know you. I know me. So I've done the analysis for my channel. I have not done the analysis for your channel, and I'm not going to do the analysis for your channel. I can explain why I am very confident that my channel is not in violation of law, but I cannot give you legal advice. If you are really that concerned about it, do consult a lawyer. I am a lawyer, but I am not your lawyer, and I am not going to risk giving you incorrect advice. I'm just not going to do that. I can give you the information that I've found, but you have to figure it out for yourself. And it may be that some content creators ought to be worried. There are some content creators out there, some toy channels that have kind of blurred the line on, you know, is it for kids or is it for adults? It's not quite as clear. And so maybe they should be worried, but that's not what we do here on this channel. This channel has had a very specific purpose since the beginning, and that purpose has not involved creating contents for children. So the steps that I took, first of all, I read everything. I read the statute, I read the regulations, I read all the FTC material about it. I watched their videos after the YouTube settlement. They had some press conferences, watched all that. I read every bit of material that I could find. The complaints and the settlement agreements, I gathered as much information as I could myself. And I felt pretty good about, I should say, I felt like I understood it pretty well. But I didn't want to take the risk that I was missing something. So I talked to a lawyer. Fortunately for me, I mean, I know a lot of lawyers. So it's more like I asked friends. So I actually talked to two lawyers about it. And after talking to those lawyers, I felt even better about my analysis and my conclusions. I also, after digging a little deeper and looking more at whether I would need to retain a lawyer, it's actually really hard to find lawyers who are experts in this topic. There aren't a lot of them. So one of the things I was thinking about is, should I retain a lawyer? You know, nothing's happened yet. I mean, the FTC has not done their sweep of the YouTube platform. And they will. They're going to sweep the whole YouTube platform to look for compliance. So I was wondering if I should retain a lawyer ahead of that just in case. I decided not to. First of all, because I don't think I need one. I don't think I will need one. And second of all, to retain a lawyer that has any kind of expertise in this area is very expensive. There are so few of them. And I would have to crowdfund the legal expenses. And I'm not comfortable asking you for money that may never be used. I will probably never need. It would only be used in the absolute worst case scenario. But in the most likely scenario, I wouldn't need it at all. So I decided that I'm not going to retain a lawyer right now. I would only do so in the event that the FTC disagreed and wanted to try to enforce the COPPA regulations against me. But I think that is so unlikely that I'm just not going to worry about it right now. If the absolute most unlikely scenario would happen, I would have to crowdfund the legal expenses because I would fight it. Because I believe that I am correct. I believe I have good defenses for my content. I think I would prevail in such a situation, but I would have to cover the legal expenses. And under those circumstances, I would ask for help with that. I don't think I'll need to. Another thing that I did is I sent a message to the Federal Trade Commission's COPPA hotline. The FTC has a COPPA hotline specifically for asking these kinds of questions and getting this kind of guidance that we need to understand our obligations under the statute and the regulations. And I also wrote a comment on the FTC's COPPA regulation public comment section. COPPA is taking public comments. If you've seen the retroblasting video, retroblasting has a forum comment that you can update with your information and plug into the public comment section. I think that's not a bad idea at all. I think that's actually a really good idea. Actually, I wrote my own because there were some specific things that I wanted to say. So I didn't follow the template, but I wrote my own. But I don't think those kind of write-in campaigns are a bad idea at all. As the FTC proposes changes to the rules, it's required to take public comments and it's required to look at those comments. I mean, they may not agree with your comments. Your comments may not change their minds, but they are required to look at it. And I believe they got a good number of comments raising this issue of does a retro-focused content like mine that deals with cartoons, comic books, and toys from the past but is not made for children, will this get caught up in their sweep of YouTube? Will someone at the FTC mistakenly think that this is children's content? That's pretty important. Those are the steps that I took. I felt like I was pretty comfortable with the conclusions that I reached. Some advice though that I didn't take and I wouldn't take and I would suggest that you not take is that if you have a small channel, the FTC will overlook you because they want to go after the big ones. And so don't worry about it if you're a small channel, you're not worth their effort. Be careful about that advice. That's basically saying it doesn't matter if you're violating the law, they just won't care. You won't get caught. They'll overlook you. Be very careful about that attitude. That is how people get in big trouble. Don't assume you're going to fly under the radar because you're a small channel. Instead, make sure you're complying with the law. Look at your stuff. Analyze your stuff. Know what your stuff is. Know what the law is. Comply with the law whether you're a big channel or a small channel. It may be true that the FTC would not consider enforcing or filing a suit for a civil penalty against your channel would be worth their effort. Maybe they wouldn't, but that's, do you want to risk that? That to me, if you actually were in violation of the law, that's a risk that I would not take. So the question I was trying to answer was are my videos directed to kids under the COPPA regulation and thus prohibited from gathering personal information from viewers under the age of 13 for the purpose of displaying targeted ads. That's the question I needed to answer. That's the only question I needed to answer because I want to know if I'm going to get sued by the federal government. That's an important thing to know. So one thing that helped is the FTC actually replied to my message on the hotline. They replied and they directed me to a brand new blog post that they posted today. Today is the 22nd, I don't know when you'll see this, November 22nd, 2019. So they had just put up a blog post and it actually has some information that was on point. And I really think the write-in campaigns helped with that. They noticed that a lot of people were writing in concerned about some specific things. And their blog post pretty much confirmed the research that I had done. It made me very comfortable that I'm on the right track. So one thing that was in their video press conference after the YouTube settlement, everybody was really freaked out because they made very clear that they intend to enforce the regulation against channel owners. Scary, hey, I'm a channel owner. But toward the end of that video, they did also make clear that they're making a distinction between children's content and general audience content. And there's all kinds of content that is safe for children that would not be subject to the statute. It's not directed at children, even though it's safe for children. And they were already trying to make that distinction even back when they announced the settlement. And they made that more clear in the blog post. So let's see, where was it? See, I'm reading. I told you this would be boring and I don't care. It's supposed to be boring. Dare to be dull. Yeah, the FTC is distinguishing between children's content and content with animated characters that appeals to a general audience or an adult audience. What they wrote, quoting it says, Just because your video has bright colors or animated characters doesn't mean you're automatically covered by COPPA. While many animated shows are directed to kids, the FTC recognizes there can be animated programming that appeals to everyone. Such programming is not what they're looking for. And then they also said the complaint in the YouTube case offers some examples of channels the FTC considered to be directed at children. And I'm going to go through those examples very briefly when you get to it. So starting at page 10 in the complaint. The first few are corporate. Mattel, Hasbro, Cartoon Network, DreamWorks TV. These are all corporate entities that sell toys and children's properties and they were like literally advertising children's toys. I mean it's very obvious that what they were doing was directed toward kids. Scrolling down a bit further we get to other types of YouTube channels like Cookie Swirl Sea. That's one that my kids used to watch when they were younger. That's children's content. Sandaroo Kids, Evan Tube HD, Little Baby Bum, Mother Goose Club, Toy Scouter, Head Shoulders, Knees and Toes, Nersi Rhyman with Rapunzel, the stuff on that channel. So looking at their examples, all of their examples are more clearly children's content. This is the kind of thing that they're looking for, not vintage toy channels for old guys. They are able to distinguish the two. One common thread is that all or most of these were featured on YouTube Kids. So YouTube knew that it was kids content. They basically flagged it as kids content back then when they were advertising that they had all this great kids content. So none of this is like what we do here. Their examples, which I think are helpful, are more clearly aimed at children. You can tell the difference. But there are factors to apply. The blog post actually repeated the factors that were in the regulation. And so that's what we need to analyze. And I've looked at the factors related to my videos. You will have to decide for yourself whether the factors apply to your videos or not. What I do when I'm trying to apply the law to the facts in my case is try to look at my facts in the worst possible light. Not in the most favorable, but in the worst case, can anyone decide that my videos fit any of these factors? I'm going to go through the factors briefly. Factor one is the subject matter. Now that may seem vague, but it's just basically what's it about. This channel is about toys, but it's about vintage toys. It's about old toys. It's about collectibles. And there are all kinds of collectibles that at one time were played with by children, but are now their vintage, their collectibles. Things that adults go after and acquire and talk about. The visual content. There is sometimes thumbnail drawings. I do title card drawings that are sometimes a bit cartoony. And that was a little bit of a concern. Are they too cartoony looking? Would these appeal to children? That's a factor that could potentially go against me. Even though my counter argument would be that they may be cartoony, but they're not characters that kids know today. They are characters that you have to be a bit older to recognize. The next is use of animated characters or child oriented activities and incentives. It's weird that these things are all in one factor, but parsing that out a little bit. The use of animated characters. I do review cartoons sometimes, but I do not have any child oriented activities. We are not doing nursery rhymes. We're not coloring and coloring books together. We're not doing any of that stuff. No head and shoulders, knees and toes. I've never had anything like that on this channel. Next factor is the kind of music or other audio content. I do not have any children's music on this channel. I never have the age of models. I'm the model. I'm the child models. The only thing that could possibly go the other direction for me is that sometimes I've had my daughter in videos. She's a young person, but she's not really a model. She does a bit of acting for me sometimes. Usually in some kind of elaborate storyline thing that, to my knowledge, also doesn't appeal to children. The presence of, I'm sorry, next factor. The presence of child celebrities or celebrities who appeal to children. I have no child celebrities. I have no celebrities that appeal to children. That's a big fat zero. Although, again, I've had my kid in videos a few times. And as much as I love my kid, she's not a child celebrity. So that factor does not go against me at all. I don't know why I would ever have a child celebrity. Language or other characteristics of the site? Well, that's, characteristics is a bit nonspecific. But I do not use language that is intended to be understood by children. I talk in my videos the way I talk in real life. I use words in my videos like I use in real life. I don't dumb anything down. I don't use like the kinder car voice. I don't know if you, you know what I'm talking about. Some content creators, they do, they do the kindergarten voice. The, the, like, like you're talking to a five year old in their videos. I don't do that. Never done it, never will. That's not something that appeals to my audience. No. Whether next factor is whether advertising that promotes or appears on the site is directed to children. Definitely not. I don't, I've not ever sold very much advertising time on my channel. I have sold a little bit. But the advertising that I've sold, if you recall, some time ago, was for a book, a novel that was explicitly for adults. In fact, it has some quite mature content. I've never advertised anything for children. And I have no intention of ever doing that. That factor is entirely in my favor. And then finally, competent and reliable empirical evidence about the age of the audience. Well, I have some empirical evidence about the age of the audience. It would probably require a bit more analysis to be sure. But based on all of my interactions, all of my comments, every bit of empirical information that I can gather, my channel is not frequented by children at all. So these factors, I feel, I feel very comfortable saying that these factors on balance are in my favor in the worst possible light. And in the most reasonable reading of these factors, I don't think any of them go against me. Even the use of animated characters, the FTC has specifically said that just having cartoon characters in your video does not trigger their enforcement. So those are the factors that I believe they apply to my channel. You will have to decide if they apply differently to your channel or not. Based on these factors, I am not going to change my setting that says that my content is for adults, not for kids. It is, for the most part, safe for kids. You can watch it with your child. But everything I do here presumes that you are old enough to remember these toys. And you are. I mean, we've talked. I've met a lot of you. And we are adults in our 30s and 40s now. The penalty. Let's talk about the penalty because the FTC specifically addressed this. And I'm going to quote from their blog. It says, the rule allows for civil penalties up to $42,530 per violation. But the FTC considers a number of factors in determining the appropriate amount including a company's financial condition and the impact a penalty could have on its ability to stay in business. While Google and YouTube paid $170 million, in another case settled this year, the operator paid a total civil penalty of $35,000. Now $35,000 is still a lot of money where I come from. But that $42,530, that's the maximum. That's the cap. That's the most they're allowed to find someone. But the fine itself, if they did find you in violation, would not be $42,000. It would be based on you individually. This indicates that they are considering whether it would affect a company's ability to stay in business. They're not trying to put companies out of business. But they are trying to find companies enough that they stop violating the statute. So this fear of a $42,000 penalty from the FTC is not reasonable for me. It's unreasonable to consider that it happened to my channel. And even the people who sounded the alarm about the fine and even those channels that honestly maybe ought to be worried because their content maybe is for kids, even for them, they're not likely to get fine $42,000 per video. The enforcement mechanism that the FTC uses is a civil suit. So if for some reason the FTC sweeps YouTube and found some of your content to be in violation of the statute, it's not as simple as just like getting a $42,000 bill from the FTC. They would file suit and that includes all of the due process that you have with a civil suit. And at that point you would want to hire a lawyer and you could defend yourself, which is what I would do in that situation. Fighting a suit against the federal government is not fun. But that's what we would be talking about in terms of enforcement. One day in the mail comes this bill and you had two videos violate COPPA. Well, that'll be $84,000 please, you know, pay within 30 days. That's not how it works. Okay, so based on this, I think the factors on balance are in my favor. I do not think that anything that I have on this channel violates the statute. If for some reason the FTC disagreed with me, I would challenge that because I am confident that I'm right. And I think the risk of needing to fight the FCC on that is extremely low. And if for some reason the FTC disagreed with me and I were facing a civil penalty, it would be in an amount much lower than $42,000. That's it in a nutshell. I'm not changing anything. I do not believe I need to change anything. I believe everything that I've done from the very beginning of this channel is in compliance with COPPA and the regulations promulgated to enforce it. I think that I am in the clear. I know a lot of you guys have been worried about your own content. You have to decide for yourself. But this channel will continue. It will go on as it always has. We will continue to make the exactly the same kind of content for G.I. Joe fans, all of whom are old geezers now like me. And if anything changes, I will let you know. If the time ever came to fight the federal government for the content on this channel, I will let you know. But at this time, we're going to just move ahead. And this is the last I'm going to say on it. I don't want this channel to become about this issue. I don't have anything else to say. This is it. I'm still getting lots of emails and stuff like that. I don't want to get involved in individual questions or trying to give advice to other people. You really have to make that decision for yourself. You really have to. So I just can't give you that advice. So I hope I've made this video long and boring enough. I hope that I have been dull enough that this video will not contribute to any of the hysterics and the drama and the panic that has occurred about this. And I hope that those sources of the misinformation and the panic and the hysteria will stop it. That's all. Thanks everyone. I'll see you pretty soon with a G.I. Joe Toy review. Thanks for watching. See you later.