The Daily Background
| Suspended
by Arlen Parsa
My YouTube account was suspended, ironically enough, for posting a promotional video- actually a trailer- for a movie that’s in theaters. In other words, the distribution company didn’t want their material advertised. I find this terribly ironic, since more than 100K had seen the trailer from my YouTube page, and that particular trailer had gone viral.
More ironic still is that the filmmaker behind the movie behind the trailer has actually made many statements about how they think copyright infringement is a good thing both for industries and artists.
When are movie studios going to start realizing that if somebody spreads your trailer on the internet, and it goes viral, and the person spreading it is literally asking people to go see the movie (I had included the release date and an encouragement that everyone see it in theaters), that that’s not a bad thing?
The thing that pisses me off is now I have to subscribe to a ton of people again, and that’s a pain. Plus replace some of my more popular/recent videos. And start out again with no subscribers (at the time of suspension, I had 500 and something, with 1.7+ million views combined). I guess I’ll make a new account.
The Google buyout was the catalyst for this sort of behavior on YouTube. Good luck on rebuilding but maybe you should just move over to DailyMotion or another video site with less stringent rules.
Yeah, I just talked with another YouTuber who recently did that… One of the tricks is not to include brand names (like CNN, ABC or The Situation Room etc) in the video description or title, that way the companies can’t find you by searching. I’m thinking of writing a post with tips on how to avoid getting copyrighted stuff removed from YouTube.
[…] long time readers may recall (although they probably don’t), my old YouTube account was suspended in September 2007 for hosting copyrighted videos– mostly videos about political stuff from television (check […]