March Update: The Abrupt Edition

It's time for a highly needed and somewhat abrupt update to discuss a couple of matters that have been going on the past few days. To put it bluntly: I have taken all of my machinima work offline until further notice from YouTube, Vimeo, Behance and FilmFreeway. To answer the lingering 'why?',  I will need to go a bit more into detail.

Earlier this week I have received a notification from YouTube stating that AR3NA and the trailer for AR3NA were taken offline due to a copyright claim from one of the artists whose music was featured in both projects. The film was not simply unlisted. Instead it was removed from YouTube in its entirety and the channel received a copyright strike. In my opinion it was quite a harsh first choice to make considering my e-mail address is open and accessible on the Channel Page to discuss matters like this. Copyright holders actually have a choice to first contact the person privately or send a 7-day notice first, which would've been the more friendly approach out of the three. 

 Having said that, in all fairness and neutrality, all choices were equally for the taking and the third-party was in their full right to choose any preferred action out of the three equally as much. For them it was the take-down, which they had the full right to do so since it was their intellectual property. Nothing more I can add about that.

First and foremost, while it sounds like a rookie mistake to make, allow me to state that I am not new to the world of Copyright. I have come to known the 'grey-area' that is called Machinima inside the big world of Intellectual Property and Copyright quite well during the past few years. Music idem dito. All of my projects contain soundtracks that have been released under Creative Commons Licenses as I am solely creating art for everyone to enjoy in an open and accessible way. Creative Commons perfectly fits this agenda as I don't have the musical capacity myself to compose my own music. I check all licenses of audio tracks before use in order to prevent these events from happening as much as I possibly can. 

And while I did check the licenses and adhered to the Creative Commons Licenses found on the respective download pages, I did make a mistake: there was another page elsewhere on the website which specified additional rules on top of the Creative Commons License where some of the licenses stated that content used those licenses was not meant to be used under video. I do have many questions as to why these additional rules could not be specified on the respective download pages of the songs, but to cut the discussion short: the licensor is right in this case and I have only myself to blame that I did not 'dig a lot deeper' into the website, so to speak.

I have always used all of the audio files obtained with Creative Commons licenses with utmost sincerity, good intent and good faith. However, due to this recent development, it is highly possible that more songs used in my work may suffer the same fate in the future. This is why I took the drastic decision of taking my work offline until further notice in order to be ahead of this development and to prevent this from ever happening again.

So, what now? A couple of projects will be re-uploaded very soon, such as Experience (2021), as agreements had been made in terms of audio use before production started already. A couple of films most likely contain audio tracks in whole that are actually cleared for video. I will also re-upload these very soon. In terms of projects that are considered not so lucky, it would mean they would have their entire audio-track stripped, recomposed, remastered and re rendered. At this moment I do not have any other choice except to properly learn music production in order to solve this issue once and for all. 

It will take a long time to fix it, but there is no other choice. On the positive side, all of my work that requires adjustments will return - stronger and better than it was ever before. It will take some time to learn these new skills and to make sure that all the projects have been updated. I will need to plan a lot of time in 2023 and 2024 to complete this matter. But, like I said, not to worry, everything will return. No matter if it is next week or next year. No stone will be left unturned. All of the films will return on YouTube in full. Considering that Vimeo's storage constraints are pretty much getting to me, meaning that I would almost not be able anymore to upload new content there,  I will re-use Vimeo as a 'Snippet Channel': containing snippets of all films with links to the full versions. This way, both channels keep serving a dedicated purpose and can remain in touch with everyone.

Last but not least, not to worry: the Machinima Projects planned for 2023 will still continue unchanged. I will need to do adjustments audio-wise of course for some, but all projects that I have planned for this year will still continue their development cycles as normal. This means it is possible that new releases and re-releases of old projects may be mixed together.

I'll be back. Stronger, and better. Until then, my apologies for these inconveniences.

- Jordy