Retubing: Earth Celebration, 2006

September tends to be a quiet month on this site. Edinburgh's just finished, the London Film Festival won't kick off till mid-October: time for a few weeks of comparatively restrained internet activity. Those batteries need to be recharged sometimes.

This September, however, I've got plans for a series of posts that won't require too much strain on the brain, yours or mine. And they're all a result of this email from YouTube, dated August 31st.

Hi SpankTM,

We received multiple notifications from various content owners regarding unauthorised content that has been uploaded by your account(s). When we're notified that a particular video uploaded to our site infringes another's copyright, we remove the material, as the law requires. US Federal law requires that we terminate accounts when they are found to repeatedly infringe copyright. Because you have had other videos rejected in the past, we are unable to reinstate your account. Users with suspended or terminated accounts are prohibited from creating new accounts or accessing YouTube's community. You will need to resolve at least one of these penalties before your account can be reinstated. You may be able to resolve at least one of the following video removals by filing a counter-notification.

The following videos have been removed from your account:

Penalty 1: "Casino Royale - 2006 trailer, 1967 music" Removed due to a copyright claim by Sony Pictures Entertainment on 11/21/2006

Penalty 2: "Hitomi" Removed due to a copyright claim by NHK (Japan Broadcasting Corporation) on 08/29/2008

Penalty 3: "Rules of Quiz Hexagon II very simple..." Removed due to a copyright claim by Association of Copyright for Computer Software on 08/23/2010

Loving that 'hi'.

So in case it isn't clear: my YouTube account's been shut down. All seventy-odd videos on it have been trashed, not just the three that they objected to. Given that 2 and 3 were both tiny clips from Japanese telly, and James Bond is now the property of Sony, the main lesson I've taken away from this is as follows: never piss off a Japanese IP lawyer.

Having quietly set up a new YouTube account under the needlessly messianic name of TheSpankTM, now comes the slightly tedious task of uploading my videos again: for now, just the ones which don't do anything too dramatic in terms of use of copyrighted material. Which means that my most popular videos - the dozen or so re-scored Felix The Cat cartoons that managed to rack up around a million hits between them - won't be seeing the light of day again for a while. No, it's mainly going to be holiday stuff, I'm afraid.

But it strikes me that some of that holiday stuff is actually pretty good. If you've been following this site since the early days, you may have already seen our various bits of footage from Japan, China, Prague and so on when I wrote about our visits there: but you may not have seen them since then, and I think it's worth reminding people they exist. So over the next few weeks, as I start rebuilding my YouTube library, I'll highlight some of the best videos on here under the Retubing heading.

This seems like a good place to start: the first thing I ever uploaded to YouTube, a little under four years ago. Largely shot by The Belated Birthday Girl (except for a couple of bits where there were tall people standing in front of her) and edited by the pair of us, it's a record of the Fringe offshoot of the Earth Celebration Festival, an annual event organised by the Kodo Drummers on their home island of Sado in Japan. It's fairly basic in technical terms, but gives a nice flavour of the range of music that could be heard on the island over the weekend - and all of it was free and available to everyone in the open air. So back off, lawyer scum.

Comments

[Suzanne Vega Fanclub]

If I were you I would tell YOUTUBE where to stick and try something like this http://porntube.com/ instead.