 Hey everybody, I am Steve and welcome back to Retro Tech. Currently I am in my shop and I'm working on a new restoration project for a Sony PVM which you can see right over here. However, over the last two days I've really had a topic that's been really pushed towards me and really towards any creator on YouTube and that is COPA or COPPA which is the Child Online Privacy Protection Act. It's about a 20 year old law that was enforced in 2000 and of course if you want to know more of that you can really just search COPPA and you'll find out a lot more about the details of the law. However, there's been a big push by the FTC, YouTube, Google and other large conglomerates to start to change how COPPA is enacted or enforced and especially push a lot of that blame onto smaller creators on YouTube such as myself and then even larger creators on the channel as well. So today I want to talk specifically about how this whole Child Protection Act can affect my channel and as well as other retro gaming channels and what we can really do to protect ourselves and then how you guys can help as the audience. So first off I want to talk a little bit about how this is going to kind of affect our channels. Now first off the point behind this law it's not like the other copyright changes and algorithm changes that people have been complaining about on YouTube over the last year. This is completely different. This is a law that's targeting video creators now while starting in January of 2020 they're going to start targeting video creators who create content and then monetize their content so allow ads on their content. They will target them and see if any of those creators actually have elements to their videos that could be considered targeting towards children and that's the children ages of 13 and under. So you can imagine how much trouble people in the retro gaming community could be in if they decide to target our community and the reason being is I guess I mean just imagine a simple here's a simple real life example of what could happen. Now let's say you just make either speed runs or maybe videos on let's play certain games. These could be really old retro games you just want to talk about them and hang out and play through the game. Well let's say that down the road sometime in 2020 Nintendo PlayStation Xbox one of these other major companies decides that they want to re-release that game or they buy the rights to it someone else re-releases the game that you've done a playthrough for and you could have made the video years ago. Well if that video all of a sudden becomes trending and then kids like the game and want to go watch your video on the game well if you have advertisements on that video all of a sudden you are have put yourself in the crosshairs of the FTC and possibly getting fined over $42,000 for just that one video and that's a real life situation that could easily happen to anybody who creates that kind of content. Now as for me I do have mostly repair content and restoration content tech talks things like that that are going to be obviously geared toward the adult and adult audience. However I do have many videos that might have a little excerpt in them that shows an example of video games being played or I might talk about a certain old retro video game in my videos about repairs and so that leaves me open to being a target myself. So how can I protect myself? First I want to show you how you can protect or help out in this situation. If you currently like YouTube and the way it's going well then you probably should check out some of the links I've put in my description of my video. There's a place where you can go sign a petition and say you're against this change and the possibility of these fines being passed on down to smaller YouTube creators and there's also another place where you can contact the FTC so I'm going to put those two links down below so if you want to help you can go right away and do that because they're going to make an ultimate decision on this within the first week of December in 2019 and we have until that date I believe it's December 6th or 9th probably I think it's the 9th but I'm not positive but we have until that date to get them to possibly change their actions and not go through with this on January 1st so if public outcry is high enough then the possibility is there that they could change their minds and not target individual creators. However as far as a creator like myself I'm going to have to go through back now before January 1st and screen every video I've ever created and make sure there's not some kind of commercial on there if it has anything to do with a possibility of being a child friendly video. So that's what I'm suggesting to most of the creators in the short term until this gets figured out. We may have to go back and just unmonitize or demonetize a lot of these videos in question that way they can't target us by saying we're making money because that's what this is all about the advertisements that are being pushed and sold to children. It's not about the content of the video so much as they're going to and it's and unfortunately if you go read the law it's completely wide open so there's an opportunity for them to interpret the ruling as any way they can and unfortunately they're going to put a lot of that burden of proof on our shoulders as creators. So specifically for creators my biggest suggestion would be for the first couple months to fill this out would be to go back and make sure January 1st that you have any video that's in question that might be just about video games specifically or younger video games. I mean think about the characters Mario, Sonic. These are timeless characters that have new modern things happening to them as far as videos and movies even and so they're going to be watching this kind of content on YouTube in 2020 I feel if we don't get any changes done. And then another thing to consider would be consider what Nintendo has done to ROM sites over the last year and a half. They've really targeted ROM sites and Nintendo specifically and anyone who has their intellectual data and is using it to make any kind of a profit or anything they've taken their legal team and really targeted those you know creators of those web pages which I don't think is really a bad thing but if Nintendo is that aggressive towards this community being retro gaming and specifically what would make you think that if they're not making any money off of us or any other retro gaming channel making content involving their characters or their games they would be glad to go then and push for legal you know push their legal team to target lobbyists in Washington to speak with the FTC and have their agents specifically again target channels that are creating this and look let's no lie monetization is a nice feedback for a nice thing for creators on YouTube but personally my channel really it's it's taken over a year and a half to start it make it $75 pre-tax number $75 an income a month so that's not a whole lot of money at the end of the year you're talking about a thousand dollars that you know is not really worth the risk if you're going to get hit with a $42,000 fine for one video and that could be per video so again I have to go back now and check all my videos to do all that but I just wanted to bring this topic into the attention of my audience and that's the reason I'm making this video today so again if you want to help out before December 9th go and follow the links do what you can sign the petition send a letter to the FTC and be civil and they will take your and put you into a category and say you know you're against this and one of the millions of people that is against this now let me reiterate this is not going to affect people that are outside of the United States because this is the FTC only controls the United States so if you make content outside of the United States then you've really just got to worry about what your local areas of government have and what kind of laws there are to protect killings in those districts so again I just want to say I don't think that COPPA is a very bad thing initially I mean it was started in the late 90s as a tool to protect children from pretty much online predators in the early years of the internet however the definitions of the law are so broad that there's a real opportunity for the government to just go in and kind of clean house and really change things up in YouTube and they might just be doing that to possibly move things out of the way for their preferred you know mainstream mainline this is an easy way to censor a lot of those alternative viewpoints that are on YouTube and that do so well on YouTube so thanks again for listening to my two cents on this I appreciate anybody who enjoys these videos but just note that if the FTC goes through with this change and nothing happens that you could see even more changes coming from me and other creators you really enjoy watching here on YouTube and we might not necessarily be the initial targets on what it looks like from a larger perspective however we're leaving things open to government officials who for whatever reason they want can decide to go and make us a target individually or as a whole entire group or genre again I'm Steve thanks again for taking this minute to watch Retro Tech and please if you have any comments suggestions or any experiences you want to talk about share them below in the comment section and I'll see you guys next time with some more retro content