YouTuber roasts CNN for stealing his video

A 74-second clip that attracted fewer than 9,000 likes for CNN on Twitter quickly turned into a major headache after the YouTube creator who made the video called them out for using it without even asking for permission. Allen Pan’s tweet quickly went viral, getting over 450,000 likes, even though he has a tiny fraction of the corporate network’s followers.

“Watch a snake walk using robotic legs” CNN had tweeted on Tuesday afternoon to its 59.4 million followers on the platform. 

“Watch a billion dollar news company use my footage without licensing it,” Pan shot back that evening. Even though he has around 37,000 followers on Twitter, he soon got far more engagement – and approval – than CNN. This caught the attention of the Daily Caller, which posted about it on Wednesday morning.

Pan explained that the Warner Bros. Discovery subsidiary never contacted him to ask for permission, noting that he usually asks for a licensing fee of around $500, “which is a fair rate and a drop in the bucket for CNN.”

When someone suggested that CNN may have engaged in fair use, Pan said this would apply to “an insubstantial amount of the work used without impact on the value” – which was not the case here.

That’s even more so because the footage CNN posted was only a small segment of the video, presented out of context. The part where a snake “walks” using robotic legs was the endpoint of a nearly ten-minute video Pan had posted on his YouTube channel, Sufficiently Advanced, on August 13. 

Titled “giving snakes they’re (sic) legs back,” the video has attracted almost 2.8 million views, and deals with Pan’s efforts to show he does not hate snakes – after a June video in which he tried sneaking some out of Florida through airport security. A still from that video is the banner on Pan’s Twitter page, dubbed AnyTechnology.