Once upon a time, there was a girl named Sarah who had to do a video essay for her digital storytelling class, ds106.
She decided to do it on her favorite movie ever: Stardust.
She spent hours and hour and hours and hours and hours and hours TIMES infinity on the project because otherwise her professors Jim Groom and his alter ego Tim Doom would disown her #4life.
However, on occasion she got bored and paused to take funny photos with her friends who were also slaving away on this project.
Finally, she finished it and uploaded it (after several attempts) to the magnificent site called Youtube.
She eagerly awaited comments on her videoessay which covered many things in fifteen minutes worth of moive clips, including the important issue who’s hot and who’s not in the movie.
But lo and behold, Sarah soon got a comment she never expected:
What was this?!? Outraged, she checked her youtube account.
But this was a class assignment! She thought. It’s a commentary to try to get people to WATCH the film!! It’s not copyright infringement!
After consulting with several people and going to Youtube’s’s copyright school and researching what the library of congress says about fair use copyright, Sarah decided to protest the video removal.
She was temporarily stopped by this warning:
but decided to continue on anyway because her case was strong; there is no way she would be turned down.
But the people behind youtube (ahem ahem google ahem ahem) were evil and all powerful. At whim, they decided who were copyright infringers and who weren’t without even taking any evidence into account. They denied her claim within seconds of receiving it and delivered a notice to her dorm room the very next hour.
Why Hello there.
Sarah got a legal counsel and amassed a huge crowd of her support for the case.
But the power of youtube was a mighty force, and caused Sarah’s case to lose. Certain that the judges had been tampered with, Sarah’s lawyers called for a mistrial. Eventually her case made it all the way up to the highest court in all the land: The Wizengamot.
Everyone was confident of Sarah’s right to post the videoessay on youtube, but the Supreme Court was deep in the pocket of youtube and they denounced her in front of the entire world:
For her crime, Sarah was banished #4LIFE to a jail in Siberia, never again to use a computer or bathe in running water. Instead, she would be in servitude to google and she would only be allowed to eat stale bread and moldy bananas.
Fearing repercussions for creating this assignment in the first place, Jim Groom and Tim Doom hightailed it to the Australian outback where they continue broadcast #ds106 radio and #ds106 TV from their underground homes of Coober Pedy.
Meanwhile, Sarah remains incarcerated in Siberia. She is biding her time until it is the perfect moment for her to escape and take down the evil youtube/google corporation and all the other people who insist on prosecuting innocents for “copyright infringement.”
1. I can’t believe you had to go through that.
2. I’ll send you postcards to Siberia.
One of my karaoke videos got taken down for copyright too. Let’s look at this. A song, that is not at all an original recording, with no lyrics to it, get’s made into a video of me, dancing in front of a green screen, singing to said song, and they feel like that is infringing on their copyright. And to top it all off, the song I was singing to? It’s a freakin Youtube video! Balls.
This is almost a better story 😉 And I hear Siberia in the spring is lovely, even if it only lasts for 6 hours.
I’m proud that you have not backed down. I had a mini mashup of a movie tagged the same way. YouTube uses an automated content detection system that looks for matches with their list of copyrighted stuff. I came across this great site where someone attempted to research what got flagged
http://www.csh.rit.edu/~parallax/
And there is the YouTomb project from MIT that (was?) documenting videos taken down
http://youtomb.mit.edu/
Frankly, what I would do (and did) is just skip youtube and just put the video on your own server. Ask someone at UMW to help you convert it to flash video (FLV) and set up a wordpress plugin so you can put it right here.
This is tragic!! Did you actually end up protesting them? Can they really sue you? In spite of my best efforts, I’m really gullible and believed this until you mentioned the Supreme Court, but even then, swear to god, my first reaction was, “wow, all of this since last night.” I got it though. Eventually.
Don’t get sued!!!I guess ds106 would get a lot of publicity, but it’s not worth it. May take a poll?
I like this because it’s funny (and I always like funny) but in all seriousness I hope you protested the hell out of your video removal because it really, really, really doesn’t constitute copyright infringement (them what control copyright law actually very recently (in the last year) made updates that basically made our project not illegal) and while YouTube was probably just covering their asses, they should really know better. But yes, protest the hell out of that removal.
Wow. Intense! I love this! The continuation of the story was epic! The pictures and the detail choice were perfect.
Youtube is like a paranoid squirrel.
Really funny write up of the situation!
More seriously (Wait, didn’t I just say that?) did you decide to protest, or not? I’m sure you’re in the clear, but I don’t blame you for not wanting to deal with the hassle of being threatened for exercising your rights.
AHAHAHAHAH!!!! Oh man, this is so incredibly awesome! I love the pictures, they really make the whole thing. I also commend you for turning a failed assignment into a whole new digital story. I’m sorry you’re a thief and I can’t watch your hours upon hours upon hours upon infinity of work, but if this never happened I’d of never gotten to read this really amazing counter story.
P.S. Moldy bananas sound gross.