A Bangkok Teacher's YouTube Side Gig Meets Copyright's Wall

Mark, the secondary assistant principal at the International Community School of Bangkok (ICS Bangkok), spends his free time doing something most administrators don't: uploading video essays on literature and film to a YouTube channel called "A Moonlighting English Teacher." He built the channel during the pandemic as a creative outlet, and it has grown to nearly 5,500 subscribers. But getting even a modest, analysis-driven channel past YouTube's copyright system, he found, is its own education, one that has only gotten harder since he started.

From Classroom to Channel

Mark grew up in Oklahoma and has spent nine years at ICS Bangkok, the first seven as an English teacher before moving into administration two years before this conversation. Teaching literature, he said, came down to three convictions: that literature communicates big ideas in a way nothing else does, that it builds empathy by putting a reader inside someone else's experience, and that beauty is worth taking seriously and pursuing deliberately. Those same convictions sent him to YouTube.

He'd always been drawn to video essays as a viewer, and during COVID lockdowns he decided to try making them himself. The channel became a way to braid together skills he already had (the essay-writing and textual analysis of teaching, some past experience recording music) with one he didn't: video editing, which he taught himself on iMovie, filling in graphics with PowerPoint. Many of his early videos grew directly out of his classroom, revisiting books he'd taught like "Life of Pi," "The Book Thief," and "The Motorcycle Diaries." Others reached for a pop-culture hook with a literary payoff, including a video connecting Disney's "Encanto" to Gabriel García Márquez. That connection isn't just a teacher's reach: Márquez's magical-realist novel "One Hundred Years of Solitude" is set in a fictional town called Macondo, the same name Disney gave Encanto's setting, and lyricist Lin-Manuel Miranda has said the film's recurring butterfly imagery was directly inspired by the golden butterflies that follow a doomed lover in Márquez's novel. His most-viewed video, built around the rhyme schemes in the musical "Hamilton," is the one piece of his catalog he still can't monetize.

His most recent video at the time, on "Dead Poets Society," marked a turning point for the channel in a different way: it was the first time he'd made a video that talked directly about teaching itself, rather than analyzing a text at arm's length. The video drew on the work of Parker Palmer, an educational thinker Mark said he was introduced to by a ninth-grade colleague at ICS Bangkok, and whose writing he called one of the most influential things he'd encountered in recent years. It's a fitting choice of film: Mark noted, only half-joking, that "Dead Poets Society" is a movie every English teacher loves, the kind that makes people want to become one.

Where the Project Hits a Wall

That's because of music, which he singled out as the single trickiest thing to clear on YouTube. The platform runs an automated system called Content ID that scans every upload against a database of copyrighted audio and video "fingerprints" submitted by rights holders; a match lets the rights holder block the video, track it, or claim its ad revenue without any human reviewing whether the use was actually fair. Short clips tend to slip through, Mark said, but not always. His video on "Dead Poets Society," his most recent at the time of the interview, got flagged so persistently that he re-uploaded it 30 or 40 times, trimming the same clips shorter each round just to keep it monetized. He'd also learned that enforcement isn't consistent: some studios aggressively police their catalogs, he said, singling out Warner Bros. as particularly difficult to clear, while older or less closely monitored properties draw less scrutiny.

I think I had to re-upload it like 30 or 40 times.

That frustration isn't unique to one moonlighting teacher. The Electronic Frontier Foundation has argued for years that Content ID's design structurally disadvantages anyone making a fair-use argument: because a claim freezes a video's revenue automatically, with no finding of infringement required, the system reverses the usual presumption that use is fair, leaving the uploader to fight an automated accusation with little recourse. A creator making commentary or criticism, precisely what Mark's channel does, is exactly the use case fair-use law is designed to protect, and exactly the kind Content ID struggles to recognize.

A Bigger Machine Than One Channel

If anything, the ground has shifted further against creators like him since this episode aired. In July 2025, YouTube updated its Partner Program policy to tighten what counts as monetizable "original" content, explicitly excluding low-effort edits (basic filters, sped-up or slowed-down clips, light cropping) that don't add real commentary, narrative, or editing value. The stated target was mass-produced and reaction-style content, not teachers building essays around books they've taught. But the update relies on the same underlying detection system, which by industry accounts became more aggressive in 2025 at catching modified clips, including ones slowed, cropped, or pitch-shifted to dodge earlier filters. For a creator already trimming a single scene dozens of times by hand, a system built to catch evasion doesn't necessarily get better at telling it apart from legitimate criticism.

The stakes for getting that distinction right keep rising, too. According to the Interactive Advertising Bureau's 2025 "Measuring the Digital Economy" report, more than 1.5 million Americans now work as digital creators full-time, a number that has grown nearly eightfold since 2020, faster than almost any other part of the economy. Educators are a natural part of that growth: teachers have spent years building audiences by explaining things clearly, and YouTube has become an obvious extension of the classroom rather than a distraction from it. But a copyright system that can't reliably tell an explainer from an infringement puts that whole category of channel on uncertain footing, whether the person behind it has 5,500 subscribers or 5 million.

Making the Time Anyway

None of that has stopped Mark from wanting to keep going, even if the job that pays his salary now leaves less room for it. He estimated he had a backlog of 30 to 40 video ideas waiting and hadn't posted in about four months by the time of the conversation, a gap he attributed partly to his new administrative role and partly to simple respect for how much work each video takes. The channel's name carries a double meaning that says something about why he keeps at it regardless: "moonlighting" for the literal second job, but also for the image of a moon reflecting a source of light it doesn't generate itself, a metaphor, tied to his own faith, for how art and stories reflect something larger than the person telling them. He's even written a poem called "Moonlight" on the blog attached to the channel, laying out the idea in his own words.

The backlog keeps growing from unexpected directions, too. Near the end of the conversation, one of the hosts pitched him, half-seriously, on tackling "Fight Club" next, a film he called great but not exactly school-appropriate. Mark's response was noncommittal but curious: the movie was adapted from a novel, and he'd want to find the right angle before committing to it. It's a small moment, but it captures how the channel actually works, less a content calendar than a running list of texts he can't stop thinking about, waiting for the time and the right argument to catch up with each other.

That framing runs through everything else he said about the project: the channel isn't really a detour from teaching, it's the same conviction in a different format, that literature and film reward close attention, and that the effort of making that case publicly is worth the real cost of fighting an algorithm to do it. Content ID isn't going away, and neither, on this evidence, is he.

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