Rumi Robinson is a content creator on YouTube who makes videos commenting on popular TV shows and events in the entertainment industry. He is a 2022 graduate of The George Washington University who is passionate about online content creation and entrepreneurship, along with most hands-on activities that involve creativity.

Rumi started his YouTube channel “imuRgency” in high school, where he made vlogs about various topics relating to his life. He had a couple of advice videos, a “Freshman’s guide to high school,” and “Creepy things you should never do,” and a few videos of him and his friends doing popular YouTube challenges, such as the Chubby Bunny challenge and the Bean Boozled challenge. The number of views on his videos started to increase when he began vlogging his college application and decision-making process, leading to one of his most viewed videos, “College Decision Reactions,” where he filmed himself opening his college acceptances/rejections from each school he applied to.

After he started attending George Washington, his vlogs were mainly lifestyle videos about being a college student. Now his channel, with over 113,000 subscribers as of May 31, 2022, has become a popular place to discuss topics in Pop Culture and television shows, such as “Why The Will Smith Oscars Situation is More Serious than You Think,” or how “Lexi Really Exposed Nate” on Season 2, Episode 7 of Euphoria.

During Rumi’s high school and early college years, his YouTube content raised very few copyright issues because his videos mostly featured him talking to the camera.  Beginning in March 2021, when Rumi began to post videos that reviewed and analyzed TV shows, two things happened:  his subscriber count began to dramatically increase, and the potential copyright issues he needed to navigate rose because he now used short clips of the TV shows he reviewed.  It is interesting and notable that for many YouTubers, those two things are tied together – greater popularity, and greater use of copyrighted material leading to potential copyright issues.  

The copyright and DMCA issues that Rumi must navigate are increased because he posts content on so many social media platforms, including Twitter, Instagram, Twitch, TikTok, and Discord.  While the laws are the same, his content often differs from platform to platform, the rules of those platforms differ, and the circumstances on those platforms can vary.  For example, in our interview with Rumi, below, he explained how his use of music in one of his YouTube Shorts led to a copyright claim.  Unlike YouTube, TikTok has entered into licensing agreements with major music studios, which allows TikTok users to include music in their posts from artists such as Mariah Carey and, yes, Beyoncé.  (See https://uproxx.com/music/tiktok-sony-beyonce-travis-scott-music-available/ and https://www.stinson.com/newsroom-publications-music-licensing-in-the-age-of-tiktok.) 

We asked Rumi how he has dealt with copyright and DMCA issues and YouTube’s Content ID system during his YouTube career: