For a year, it worked beautifully. Then came the day it crossed a line.
He added a mandatory terms-of-service check. Free for educational, archival, and personal offline use. For commercial use—reaction channels, re-uploaders, pirates—he added a paid tier with a conspicuous watermark and a public log of every downloaded video’s source URL. “Transparency, not obscurity,” he declared.
But YouTube was a labyrinth of fragility. Every week, a channel she relied on would vanish due to a copyright strike or a forgotten password. A legendary 1985 performance by a Malian guitarist? Gone. A 1994 interview with a Senegalese drummer? Deleted.