Update: Steve, the CEO of Hottrix called me. He is confused by all of this. Like I said, I am sure this was just an oversight. Things happen. It just gave me something to blog about.

I get tons of spam in my YouTube inbox. I never look at it, really, virtually never. But today, I decided to scan through it. What do I find? I a letter from the people at Hottrix about my iPhone Popcorn video that I blogged about a year ago. Here is the letter:

We would really appreciate it if you could remove any comments or references on how to get our video for free. Also, on your website as well (I think you only had one link posting it for free and our lawyer will take care of removing the download from his site.) It is copywritten material we created and should only be for sale on our website. We do not mind performance videos, just not the "freebie" comments. Heck, you should sign up as an affiliate and link to it from your site and make some money, it looks like you have a good following. Typically we just flag these videos, but you do have a lot of viewers so I really don't want to do that to you.

Thanks in advance.
The sleepless crew at Hottrix.

Then I got this the same day:

Sorry, I just noticed someone else in our office already flagged your video. Others in our copyright watch are asked to flag copyright violations.

Two things:

(1) If you want to threaten me with a lawsuit, do not send me a message via YouTube.
(2) I have never said it was free, in fact, your CEO gave me at least one video for free (not the one above) so I would blog about how I got it. Which I did, at The Truth Behind my iPhone Popcorn. I guess someone in the comments talked about freebies, but I am not going through the 1,247 comments on my video to weed them out.

Is it that you are upset that my video outranks your promotional video for iphone popcorn? Is it because you are upset my video has 1,365,034 views and yours only has 741,179? What is it?

I am sure it was an oversight, so I won't continue giving you a hard time, Hottrix. I am sure you just had one of your people, go through YouTube and send this letter, via copy and paste, to every mention of videos related to your product.

iPhone Popcorn Google Results

This legal email has been sitting in my YouTube inbox for over a month. Good going.