List of VidNet controversies

Like any video-sharing website, VidNet has been the subject to controversies throughout its time. The controversies can be attributed to censorship, crime, criticism, and piracy/copyright infringement.

Toxic working conditions
In 2003, an e-mail from Manuel Sato (the brother of Mark Sato) was sent using the support e-mail address of VidSpace to alert all of the users and media outlets. According to the e-mail, Manuel investigated the working conditions in the headquarters and he found out the following: The reason why it was leaked was because of most of the employees were fed up by their CEO at the time due to his questionable criminal record prior being a CEO in 2001. Because of the leak, many employees protested against the CEO (Jeremy Santos) outside the building. Jeremy Santos was stepped down from the company and was replaced by Manuel Sato from late 2003 until 2008. The protest became one of the memorable moments in VidNet history.
 * 1) All of the hallways were filled with security guards in order to monitor the employees movement and if something goes wrong they'll have their jobs reassigned or be fired.
 * 2) All of the e-mails were monitored, which means that any email that is obscene or a threat to the company will result in an extended overtime.
 * 3) Every single room were filled with microphones so any rants or anger management issues will make an employee demoted.

2005 data wipe
Sometime around the March 3, 2005, a user named JohnSchwarz, whose real name is Dominic Becker (German techno DJ), sent a message to the support e-mail of VidNet. The message reads:"'Greetings staff of VidNet,""I want to negotiate to you. This is an urgent message. You have 5 minutes to answer this message. If you don't answer there will be consequences.""If you gave me a million Euros, we won't do anything to you. But, if you don't, we will track you down and wipe all of your data. You promise that?'""- JohnSchwarz (translated from Leet)"At the time Dominic was residing in the Philippines (where the website is based in), he was able to disguise himself as Pennywise and entered the VidNet headquarters when the staff refused to reply to him. He sneaked into the server room and executed a command to wipe the entire drive. When one of the staff noticed it (whose identity remains anonymous), Dominic pushed the person when he stopped the command at around 75%. Because of that, everyone witnessed him, as he ran away from the building. The police couldn't find him anywhere (even inside his house) until he was found in a nightclub in Cebu, Philippines. Dominic was declared persona non grata in the country and deported back to Germany. Later, his account was banned on April 7, 2005.

Almost every video that were hosted on VidNet were deleted and no backups were found. It wasn't until VidNet contacted Jason Scott from the Internet Archive if they have a backup of all the videos that were hosted on the website prior to the incident. Jason Scott was able to ship the backup to VidNet and thanked them.

The backups that were sent from the Internet Archive were stored on fifty StorageTek T9840A "Eagle" tapes, ten LTO-1 tapes and five LTO-2 tapes, totaling to around 3TB of the backup. The process of restoring them wasn't started until May 2, 2005, because they have to earn enough money to buy the necessary equipment to backup and restore from tape storage. The process was finally done in four weeks, with additional six weeks for reuploading.

However, an exorbitantly small percentage of the videos that were hosted prior to the incident are still lost to this day. This formed a division inside VidNet named Obscure Video Recovery Team (OVRT), which tracks down the last of the lost videos from VidNet. As of 2020, more than 346 videos were found and reuploaded to the website. It was estimated that over 700 to 900 obscure videos were lost during the incident. The incident was considered the dark age in VidNet history.

Block in Germany
In 2008, according to a German court in Hamburg, VidNet could be held liable for damages when it hosts copyrighted videos without the copyright holder's permission. As a result, music videos for major label artists on VidNet, as well as many videos containing background music, are geoblocked in Germany since the end of March 2008 after the previous agreement had expired and negotiations for a new license agreement were stopped. On June 30, 2010, VidNet won a partial victory against GEMA in a state court in Munich, which ruled that they could not be held liable for such damages.

In July 2010, the higher regional court of Hamburg also rejected GEMA's claim for €1.6 million in damages.

In 2011, VidNet and GEMA, who represents 70,000 composers and publishers, reached a settlement agreement. The settlement sum is unknown.

Using the copyright strike system as an extortion tool by Team Basilisk
Shortly after the upload of Team Basilisk's Project #6829, many users, including DailyDoseOfInternetPH, Rappler and GLOCO started making videos about Project #6829 (a fanmade SCP). After a few hours of upload, users began to receive a cease-and-desist DMCA order from Team Basilisk and that users should pay 100,000 pesos in order to appeal a strike. Because of that, some of the VidNetizens contacted the NBI Cybercrime Division by sending the link of Team Basilisk's social media accounts (including the Discord server) and the NBI arrested and prompted all of the social media sites (including VidNet and Discord) to ban Team Basilisk and VidNet to remove all of the copyright strike that the users had.