A copyright takedown has led a talented artist to remove his entire oeuvre from public view (developing)
Machinima, a genre of video art that has garnered increasing interest in the past twenty years, is primarily predicated on the use of appropriation — a practice that utilizes copyright-protected material belonging to others. Accordingly, the incorporation of game assets by machinimakers may necessitate specific permissions and licenses from game developers and publishers. These entities may also impose restrictions on the type of content that can be produced using their games.
Despite the efforts of machinima creators to secure requisite licenses and permissions, copyright infringement risks remain a nagging concern. In particular, the unauthorized use of copyrighted music or other protected content in machinima videos may lead to copyright infringement litigation. Ultimately, the dynamic interplay between appropriation and copyright law in the machinima landscape is a gray area and remains a crucial issue that requires delicate handling.
Consider the case of Dutch machinimaker and artist Jordy Veenstra, whose stunning AR3NAE was recently featured on VRAL S03, has been struck by a copyright takedown.
Specifically, Veenstra has decided to remove all his machinima work from YouTube, Vimeo, Behance, and FilmFreeway due to a copyright claim from an artist whose music was used in two separate projects. His YouTube channel received a copyright strike, which the author believes was a harsh first choice considering his email address is accessible on the channel page and the works was released under a CC license. Nonetheless, Veenstra acknowledges that the third-party was within their right to take down the videos as the track was their intellectual property.
Veenstra admits he made a mistake by not checking the additional rules specified on a separate page of the website, which stated that some of the licenses were not meant to be used under video. Veenstra believes that it is highly possible that more songs used in their work may suffer the same fate in the future, so he took the drastic decision of taking his entire machinima production offline until further notice to prevent this from happening again.
Veenstra plans to re-upload some projects soon as agreements had been made in terms of audio use before production started. For projects, the machinimaker will need to strip, recompose, remaster, and re-render the entire audio track, which will take a long time. Veenstra plans to properly learn music production to solve this issue and create original tracks. Finally, according to Veenstra, every single machinima will become visible again in the near future.
As Veenstra explains:
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.
