The Magic Pirate Bounty Hunters

Before we get into this, it's worth noting that Ellusionist sponsors One Ahead.

Geraint Clarke became the CEO of Ellusionist in recent years, and it's easy to see the striking change in their business. From a new brand image to their brutally honest blog posts, Ellusionist is in a new era. But there was one issue he wasn't sure how to tackle.

It's an issue that impacts all of magic, including us lot, but it most directly impacts magic creators and businesses. That's right – magic piracy. It might sound like a funny concept, but file sharing, pirate sites, and unauthorized teaching/exposure videos seriously impact the magic businesses. What began at the start of the internet as a debate about whether open domain tricks (ones first taught over 50 years ago) should be available on YouTube for free has quickly snowballed into TikTokers and YouTubers (even notable magic names) reuploading tutorials and exposing tricks recently published by creators.

Lots of magic businesses handle piracy in different ways, with some taking a public lead more than others. Perhaps my favourite method to tackle pirates was by Rick Lax almost a decade ago. For a trick he published via theory11, he'd also record fake exposure videos and even wear masks to hide his identity. These fake tutorials would be posted on YouTube for people searching out pirated tutorials to find. Halfway through the video, Rick Lax unmasks, shames the viewers and encourages them to buy the actual tutorial.

This Rick Lax method is made so much more bizarre now when you consider how the magic community views him and his friend Justin Flom today regarding trick exposure. You couldn't make this shit up.

Last week, Geraint was sent a flurry of DM's about a magician named Ekaterina. She's a Canadian magician who has seen a meteoric rise in views and followers since she began frequently posting short tutorial videos online. On Instagram alone, Ekat has amassed 1.3 million followers.

As we often say on One Ahead, if you want internet fame – trust the algorithm: consistently feed it the same kind of content and let the algorithm find your audience. The only issue with this strategy is that once you're on the algorithm train, it can be challenging to get off it – and when your life revolves around feeding content into a money-making machine you've created for yourself, well – people's morals change quickly.

A couple of years ago, there was a large backlash within the magic community when Justin Flom unnecessarily exposed an illusion base in one of his Facebook prank videos to millions of views. We wrote a story on Flom when YouTube began monetising short-form content, and Flom flooded our feeds with exposure videos.

It's easy for most magicians not to expose a magic trick online, but at a certain point, with millions of viewers, it becomes easy to tune out the opinions of a few hundred magicians – and imagine if you knew that you needed a new video that week to continue to make hundreds of thousands of dollars a month – what if someone told you you'd make an extra $8,000 if you expose a magic trick, or get an extra 10,000 followers if you teach a trick published by someone else?

That's the thing – it's a moral decision, not a legal one. It really comes down to what you believe is morally right because this sort of thing is impossible to police and legally problematic – or is it?

Ellusionist's DM's were busy last week because Ekat had posted multiple tutorials for tricks that were originally Ellusionist products, and many magicians sent the videos to E. She did not seek or get permission from Ellusionist or the creators to teach the effects with identical methods.

When Ellusionist asked her to take down the videos and threatened legal action, Ekat blocked Ellusionist and refused to remove the videos. We haven't seen the full interaction, and we're limited to the quite strongly worded blog post Ellusionist wrote about the situation.

And even if we did know the extent of the interaction, this sort of scenario is complicated – Ekat renames the tricks and films new tutorials so it isn't as clean cut as if she re-uploaded pirated videos with identical product names.

Ironically, Ekat's "Let's Learn" tutorial format has now been ripped off by Oscar Owen, a YouTuber with 200 million views. We previously wrote about Oscar when his rise began after exposing marketed tricks.

Why these creators don't simply open up an old magic book and teach those tricks to avoid all this magic drama is beyond us…

But you need to know about Ekat and Geraint's interaction because it plays an important role in what happens next. It motivated Ellusionist more than ever to find a solution or a more sustainable way to police these kinds of scenarios.

The second thing that played an important role in what happened next was that Geraint sat down that night and watched a film. It was Django Unchained, the Quentin Tarantino movie starring Jamie Foxx. The story follows a slave who trains under a German bounty hunter with the ultimate goal of reuniting with his long-lost wife. Bounty hunters are people who pursue criminals or fugitives in exchange for rewards. Similar bounties are offered today for hunters and ethical hackers finding bugs and security weaknesses.

As ridiculous as this story is becoming – Geraint sat there watching the film with his wife and dog and had an idea. Quietly, he sent an email to the Ellusionist graphic designer. He needed a new emblem for something he was going to call Magic Bounty Hunters.

The next day, Geraint wrote his sternly worded blog post and launched something called Bounty Hunters. This is how it works: everyday magicians and magic fans can find and send pirate links to Ellusionist's team. Then, a member of their team will give them a bounty fee as high as $1,000. If the magician can get the video removed from the internet, they'll receive their bounty.

Before you cheeky lot get all excited, there are also some strict rules (based on upload date, view count and subscriber count) which make it difficult for anyone to cheat the system by uploading and removing their own videos.

There are multiple ways bounty hunters can get these videos removed. The most popular option is to flag the video with a copyright strike. The bounty hunters are able to act on behalf of the copyright owner (Ellusionist) for up to seven days per violation. If it goes beyond the seven days, Ellusionist must get involved, and so the bounty is voided. But how long do these kinds of bounties take to conclude, and is this new initiative working?

Ellusionist tells us that the first 30 submissions blew them away. There were all sorts of piracy videos they didn't even know existed. One of them had close to half a million views on YouTube, with another exposing the method to their Ice Cold ACAAN getting 40,000 views.

If you can believe it, the first submission they received had its bounty awarded the same day. The bounty hunter received the full payment after handling the strike-down request, all within 15 hours. Madness.

But why would Ellusionist want to pay up to $1,000 to get these pirate videos taken down? And why don't they do it themselves? Well, it's clear that this was a bit of a bet to begin with, and it's difficult to know if E will hire someone full-time to do this down the line. For now, the bounty hunter system means they only pay when a video is successfully removed from the internet. But why pay so much?

Well – the video with 40,000 views exposed the method to a $10 download, and it was titled "Ice Cold ACAAN by Ellusionist and Mitchell Kettlewell Revealed". Ellusionist agreed to pay the bounty hunter $500 if they were able to get it removed from YouTube. Their reasoning is that if just 1% of the people who viewed the pirate video had bought the tutorial instead, they would have made $4,000. It's their hope that more purchases will be made in the future and that these kinds of copyright strikes will put off or at least make it harder for creators to expose tricks online.

Even though the bounty hunter couldn't get this particular video down within seven days, Ellusionist still paid them a $50 finders fee when they successfully took it down. Time will tell if this new innovative method of fighting piracy will help tackle piracy – something which, if we're honest, is a fight that not many magicians care about beyond the creators and brand. Perhaps, of all the methods, this bounty hunter concept engages the everyday magician to join the fight.