Jimquisition: Copyright War

[Ragsnstitches]

Wow Jim, you really got me into a righteous mood. That last bit was exquisite. I've now got a powerful urge to flip off "The Man".

When I heard about this recent copyright crackdown I figured I'd be seeing a midweek Jimquisition. Man, I love you when you're all fired up like this.

I'm surprised I haven't heard much feedback from some of my frequented gaming channels.

 

[Roxas1359]

Do we happen to have a list of the publishers who are asking to have their games footage removed?

The ones that are more prominent on jumping on anything are SEGA and Nintendo. There are others, but SEGA and Nintendo are the most active ones as of late.
For me I've been LPing for over a year and a half and I always come in contact with getting a 3rd Party claim on my videos, although most of the time it's never from the people who actually own the IP since YouTube's system is so broken.
There have been a total of 3 claims that I've experienced where something in the video actually belonged to the company that filed the claim and they were from: Sega, Nintendo, and Square Enix. Luckily for me the one from SEGA was just an old trailer I did to promote an old LP I did; the one from Nintendo was gone after I removed a song I used while speeding up the footage (I credited Nintendo in the video as well, but oh well); the one from Square Enix was from the beginning part of my old Final Fantasy X International LP, but I had cancelled that one long ago and the videos were set to unlisted so the public couldn't even see them, so I just removed them all together.

Although believe me, you have to heavily edit out some things when it comes to trying to fall under fair use, and it's getting to the point where you have to start cutting out parts that you really don't want to, but then again I find myself going more to Game Anyone these days so perhaps I'll just cut my ties with YouTube altogether and just go there. ^.^

 

[Reyold]

That speech at the end, Jim? Brilliant. Absolutely brilliant.

"We don't need you anymore and that's what really scares you."

I have been saying this for a long time, Jim. You echo my sentiments exactly. Thank you.

I'll second that sentiment. What with Kickstarter and whatever other avenues I'm probably missing, publishers aren't needed anymore, and considering their general behavior, I'd say plenty of people don't want them anymore.

captcha: red tape

Publishers seem to love that stuff, huh, captcha?

 

[gigastar]

Right now I think the best rival for youtube would be something like Twitch.tv

Thanks, I'll give it a look.

No, Twitch is not quite as bad as YouTube is getting, but the publishers still have a presence there. Especially those who are dealing in e-Sports, whom are among Twitch's biggest benefactors.

Really i think the only real solution (assuming copyright law isnt updated) would be to make a new site then host it out of a country that doesnt answer to US copyright law. Of the candidates, China has the great firewall and extreme state oversight of everything, and several other former communist states probably lack the required infastructure for it to work. So Russia would probably be best.

 

[JarinArenos]

I think the best option would be to severely punish copyright holders who flag things falsely, make them hire people to troll through videos for copyrighted content.

Three strikes on both sides, if you infringe copyright three times your youtube account is disabled. However if a company or one of their representatives makes a false copyright claim three times they lose the ability to make claims for a year at the least.

This really needs to be repeated. Currently this underlines what's wrong in both the patent and copyright systems in the US (and to a lesser extent, EU). There is no penalty for making false or abusive claims whatsoever, so it's all reward, no risk, just shotgun those copyright claims out there and see what hits.

 

[RJ Dalton]

I'll second that sentiment. What with Kickstarter and whatever other avenues I'm probably missing, publishers aren't needed anymore, and considering their general behavior, I'd say plenty of people don't want them anymore.

Not only are they not needed, they are now actively harming the creative community by pinholing the content that's allowed to be published. The indie community proves that strange games that break the so called rules can be successful, but publishers still insist on the holding to old, outdated models that were never true to begin with. And if books like Twilight prove anything, it's that being published isn't a guarantee of real quality.
But more than even that, they don't actually produce anything. They merely profit from the works of others, taking money away from those who actually do the real work and stomping down on anyone who tries to do things differently.

Publishers are parasites on the human imagination and I say it's about time to pluck them off and discard them.

 

[Tono Makt]

Maybe they just don't like the fact that a video made by a random bigshot on YouTube can null millions worth of advertising in a matter of hours. We've seen Amazon removing negative customer reviews of new EA games multiple times (oh sorry, I forgot, that was that ominous "glitch"), and let's play's are basically the same. You just get to see what people like and dislike in motion rather than reading about it.

Going to lukewarmly agree with this sentiment. I'm ambivalent towards advertising at the best of times, but the cult of personality that can follow some online personalities can turn one man's opinion into gaming fact. If I were to create a video game, I would be extremely hesitant to allow anyone to use video from it in their own video's. In the end I would allow it, but it would be something that would cause me a great deal of stress. (Unless I was a billionaire and could afford to have people monitoring Youtube and more popular gaming sites to see if it was being used. Then I might be able to control the content to a degree which would keep my stress levels down.)

On the other hand, I want the Jeremy Jahn's and Angry Joe's out there able to review things they think are horrible and are able to give their honest opinions about it - and use gameplay footage to give evidence to their opinions. I want them to be able to deconstruct scenes in games that they feel is inferior, so that they aren't simply saying "This Sucks!" but are saying "This Sucks! (insert gameplay footage) What is that? That's so wrong! (insert more gameplay footage) WTF, Developer? (insert more gameplay footage) Seriously? Did you even think this through?". If I were to create a video game, and had the resources to have some sort of control over how the content was used, I might encourage reviewers like that to use footage from my game because I might be able to get some honest and useful criticism... as well as places to start with DLC patches, fixes and updates.

So... really conflicted on this topic.

 

[rbstewart7263]

You know if it benefits pewdiepie its a bad thing. I swear is this even a sustainable model? I dont think it is and I hope tht it fails miserably.

seriously though is it?

 

[NWJ94]

Eh, let em.

Murky copyright laws aside any company dumb enough to do this is just shooting themselves in the foot. Free marketing is free marketing and scrambling to gain the small sums of money youtube personalities make in exchange for forfeiting the free coverage of respected third party individuals recommending and demonstrating your product is a remarkably short sighted, and laughably idiotic, move.

Let the companies stupid enough to do this lose their free marketing and the companies smart enough profit. Capitalism at its best.

 

[MonkeyPunch]

Yay! I browse to the Escapist even when there's no Jim planned just in the hope that he may have done some extra stuff - and he has!
Also, yeah we don't need them. They need us. They need us to buy their shit. But we can just blank them and buy less of their games. We can stream other devs stuff and make their stuff popular and make it go viral. Keep prohibiting us and we shall (to your dismay) crap on you and go somewhere else and make other peoples stuff exciting to others.
We're fussed for a minute. You loose free advertising for ever >

 

[Sylocat]

Not that it matters in the end, but we really have no way of knowing how many of these videos are actually getting flagged by the publishers and how many are just getting automatically pulled the broken and glitchy pattern-matching bots... And the publishers aren't the ones who forced YouTube to implement those godawful systems in the first place (that credit goes to Viacom).

 

[Foolery]

Honestly, it was only a matter of time. I'm surprised it didn't happen sooner. The fact that publishers would use their legal powers to get a slice of the revenue or shut it down, shouldn't be a shock. It should be expected. I hope LPers have backup plans and jobs.

 

[Canadamus Prime]

What's really idiotic is that the Publishers would ultimately benefit if they gave these channels a little leeway.

 

[senordesol]

It's so bizarre that companies would be this gleefully complicit in aiding their competition. Now I could dig a company's argument that piracy of their product -at least in theory- loses them money given that people are enjoying an un-negotiated complete commercial experience.

But LPs? Trailer Footage? Reviews? The only way I can conceive of that hurting a company is if a product sucks and the footage proves it. But then, they've got bigger problems don't they?

I can only hope that we see an explosion of lesser-known and otherwise under-covered titles that realize people showing off their stuff only means more dollars for them. That these bloated, anachronistic dinosaurs of a bygone era finally collapse under their own weight to make room for the more agile and savvy species.

 

[VonBrewskie]

Good on yah Jim. Always happy to have an extra slice of fuck-off pie in my week. Stand your ground homie. We'll stand with you, (and others of your ilk) wallets at the ready.

 

[synobal]

The fastest way to get me to not buy your game is to make me watch pewdiepie.

 

[BabySinclair]

content irrelevant

I can tell tis the season, your gif is back.

OT: Wait... publishers are being pricks? I thought they stood up for consumers' rights and Jim was doing a sarcasm show... well that changes things...

But this isn't really a surprise now is it? Publishers have been trying to control every aspect of "their" games. They control the development, marketing, distribution, and they want to control it post-launch. Hopefully publishers will start dying off in time without game developers being forced to fold and this whole middle man /gatekeeper BS can get resolved.

 

[Knight Templar]

Good. Lemme say that again: Gooooooooooooooood. I hope the publishers go buck wild and punish every LPer they can for every little reason they can. And then, when they come back whining that the indie crowd is growing larger because of a growth in free press and that they want a slice of that because their sales have dropped, we can tell them to go suck on it.

Here's your rope, publishers. Have fun.

I'm worried that the damage already done by that point will be too much. If the system is bent over backwards to serve them, it won't matter if some decide to stop making use of it, the system is still broken and easly abused by design.