Twitch and Kick wunderkind Félix Lengyel, who’s better known online as xQc, got into an ugly spat with podcaster and YouTuber Ethan Klein, or h3h3productions, about the former’s infamously low-effort reaction videos. The August 7 H3 Podcast channel livestream was originally intended to be a “debate” about Lengyel’s tendency to flout copyright laws, such as his recent attempt to play the entirety of The Dark Knight to his Kick audience, but ultimately devolved into finger-pointing and Lengyel wriggling on the floor like a worm.
“People would rather watch me […] do the fucking worm” than watch Klein’s podcast, Lengyel said before tearing off his headphones, dropping to the floor, and inching off-screen, belly-down.
“You like that, bitch-ass?” Lengyel asked after groaning and standing back up.
Despite this chilling show of dominance, the H3 livestream began relatively inoffensively, with Klein yawning as Lengyel joined the podcast and admitted that he hadn’t slept yet, “because I didn’t want to.” The sleepy grown men then decided they were ready to start having an important conversation about ethics.
Klein originally rose to YouTube fame for posting his own crass reaction videos, and won a “fair use” copyright lawsuit about one of them in 2017. He now seems to have a more sure stance on what constitutes as “stealing” content: If a reaction or video repost is truly “transformative,” as the U.S. copyright office says in its definition of fair use, then it’s likely safe from harming an original video’s creator’s revenue, as some have accused xQc of doing.
Lengyel, to his credit, openly admits during the debate that he is not particularly concerned with the legality of ripping content, and that his YouTube reaction videos—which, according to Social Blade, could yield him up to $94,000 a month— are “non-transformative dogshit.”
According to Lengyel, Klein’s attempt to prove that he does, indeed, create non-transformative dogshit is “like saying I’m white, and I’m on camera.” So, what are we fighting about again? Oh yeah, if you would still love me if I were a worm.
