Mr Hiphop - YouTube...YouBube'd

DatabackUp Director Tom O'Connor Suffers A Week Long Battle with YouTube for the Removal of Discreditting Video

Tom O'Connor, Director of Dublin based online backup company DataBackUp, has expressed his severe annoyance over the length of time and hassle it took for YouTube to remove a prank video removed from their website.

In an interview with IrishDev.com today, the 27 year old businessman explained that he became aware of the video last week. It had been made up of 'stills' copied from his Bebo account.

IrishDev.com were alerted to the video when an email was received yesterday from a GMail account holder Gordan Penrose. In his email Mr Penrose alleges O'Connor was posing with a handgun and implies that with "gun crime in Ireland at an all time high, it’s a sad state of affairs when you see this type of behaviour especially  from business people who on one hand are trying to promote themselves as responsible leaders in the community in order to win business deals, while on the other hand are engaged in this type of behaviour."

The email continues by suggesting that being associated with Mr O'Connor and his company, IrishDev.com were in fact condoning his actions.

Mr O'Connor says that the photo was taken some time ago, and in fact a water pistol which is clearly evident in the photo. Although he stopped short of outright rejecting gun crime, he continues by saying that the pose was to portray a James Bond character rather than Neighbourhood Gangsta, however with his past connections to the hiphop music scene which had been heavily portrayed in the video and his website, he can accept how it might have been perceived as more sinister.

So far, Mr O'Connor, who was nominated for an Internet Marketer award at last year's IIA Netvisionary awards,  says that the publicity has not caused DataBackUp to suffer any loss of business, however points out that this is probably because the vast majority of his customers know him personally and realise that there is not a grain of truth in Penrose's slur on his reputation.

Since the video was uploaded to YouTube a week ago, over 200,000 people viewed the video and Mr O'Connor received several emails of an abusive nature. He said, "I have received emails from anonymous people suggesting I should kill myself. I found these emails to be extremely distressing especially in light of my friend Darren Sutherland passing away last week. Suicide rates are on the increase and having experienced this type of abuse, I can quite understand how some people could be tipped over the edge."

Over the last 4 days, Mr O'Connor made numerous attempts to contact both YouTube and Google's legal team to have the video removed. He is digusted by the evident lack of assistance by both companies to assist him and believes they should do more to police the services they are making money from. The video was finally suspended after various media channels picked up on the story and it began getting air time.

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