QuadJacks would like to issue the following statement:
As of today, April 2, 2012, QuadJacks is deleting every video attributed to Internet songwriter SrslySirius while he was associated with this company from May 2011 until February 2012. QuadJacks does this with a very heavy heart, but out of a necessity to preserve our integrity by distancing ourselves as much as we can from SrslySirius, whose judgment and character have had to be put into serious question in the last month.
On March 6, while he was no longer with QuadJacks, SrslySirius released a new song named “Nightmare on My Street,” and in just two days, the video had gone from 0 to over 1 million views.
This caught the attention of News Views and Gossip, SrslySirius’s birthplace, which started a thread congratulating SrslySirius. At one point, SrslySirius himself intervened thanking the crowd and saying he couldn’t have done it without them.
However, it didn’t take long for the Two Plus Two community, famous for its detection of online cheating, to realize that things weren’t adding up. The video’s extremely rapid view count, compared to some very conspicuous irregularities, strongly indicated that viewbotting had taken place.
Viewbotting is an extremely unethical method of artificially inflating a video’s view count. It’s obviously a very dishonest thing to do, and it’s also a form of fraud. You try to fool YouTube and Google into making it look like you have more viewers, so that you can get more money for your monetized videos, which is what SS is doing.
To this day, SrslySirius has said nothing publicly to address or distance himself from any wrongdoing, which has led to increasing conviction that something illegitimate has been perpetrated. SrslySirius’s reputation has suffered enormously as a result.
After having studied the situation thoroughly, QuadJacks is sufficiently confident that SrslySirius is in fact responsible for viewbotting in the case of Nightmare on My Street, which is something that genuinely shocks us and disturbs us. Given SrslySirius’s past working with us, it also implicates us. Did SrslySirius secretly viewbot on behalf of QuadJacks during his tenure? Not to our knowledge, and we have absolutely no reason to suspect this.
However, because we are unable to 100% guarantee this, and because of the controversy now linked to SrslySirius’s name, we have made the choice to eliminate all videos bearing his name.
The unpleasantness of this situation is greatly worsened by the actions which SrslySirius chose to take against QuadJacks in an effort to salvage his battered reputation.
Shortly after the viewbotting controversy, on the week of Monday, March 19, SrslySirius filed, without notice, a YouTube copyright complaint against QuadJacks on 4 videos which had been hosted on our channel for several months.
SrslySirius has no legitimate copyright claim to these works. Each one of those productions was a collaborative effort by the QuadJacks team, to which SrslySirius famously belonged during that period.
But SrslySirius did this with the sole intention of appropriating one song in particular. The remix of “Willy Wonka You Get Nothing,” which QuadJacks released in January, had become a genuine viral hit, which SrslySirius was quick to upload to his own channel.
It wouldn’t stay up for very long, however. QuadJacks immediately made the decision not to allow this exploitation, by submitting our own proprietary complaint.
Now, if you think that SrslySirius himself has the right to protect the work which he thinks is his, be aware that just this weekend, SrslySirius did not even protest, but instead encouraged, the presence of the same video on another person’s channel, this time without any apparent copyright concerns.
He has also stated that he is considering suing QuadJacks over the song.
But QuadJacks has no time or desire to engage in an extended dispute for control of videos which we are by now embarrassed to be hosting anyway.
QuadJacks takes no pleasure in issuing this statement, and never wanted to. However, we feel that presenting this account of our experience with SrslySirius was the right thing to do.
QuadJacks – Monday, April 2, 2012