Wednesday, October 17, 2012

With FIRE & SWORD : RIP


I have the sad task of announcing that my "With FIRE & SWORD" Youtube channel is no more, which is something I never expected but there you go. It's a typical Google/Youtube cluster-f**k.

As I mentioned recently, Youtube put a strike on the channel because I uploaded THE BLACK TULIPE starring Alain Delon and Virna Lisi when a French TV network claimed copyright infringement even if that film is in the public domain here in North America.  Because Youtube (Google) doesn't follow standard laws and creates new ones, I had to remove it and the channel was permantly tarred with a strike. After 3 strikes, a channel is permanently closed.

So yesterday Youtube put a strike on my now defunct "FAST FORWARD CINEMA" channel, which I loved, for a copyright infringement for ZONTAR, a film everyone, including Archive.org (see here), says it's a public domain film. So why would a strike on a different channel affect the "With FIRE & SWORD" one? Well, years ago, when Youtube was just Youtube, one could have multiple channels attached to a single email address. 3 of my 4 channels back in 2008 were attached to one single email address but when Google bought Youtube, Google changed the rules and every channel had to have its own separate email address. So I had to detach all 3 channels from that one email address and add 2 new emails to 2 channels. You'd think this would be the end of it but in typical Google cluster-f**k fashion, when the "FAST FORWARD CINEMA" channel got a strike for ZONTAR the "With FIRE & SWORD" channel, which was attached to that same email address years ago, also got that same strike. And there's NO way to go about and fix this (google statement: people have reported that accidental data merging can occur between accounts). The old email address shouldn't be attached to WFAS but somehow it still was. So in less than 2 weeks "With FIRE & SWORD" got 2 deadly strikes while it got nothing when it was in operations for the past 4 years. Instead of waiting for Google/Youtube to make another stupid blunder and kill my channel I decided to close it myself.

I might re-open another one down the road but for now I'm just glad I still have the main "PEPLUM TV"  channel and the "Sappho PEPLUM" channel, for now at least. Needless to say I hate Youtube/Google.

BTW, if you search ZONTAR on Youtube you'll find dozens of channels showing the same movie or part of it. Why did they target me specifically?

2 comments:

Steve R. Orsulak said...

It seems to me that there's a conspiracy here and your being targeted by someone that has complained to Google. I hope that this will be resolved somehow and you can get F&S back on the web.

PEPLUM cinema said...

Well, there's a conspiracy alright but there's nothing much I can do about it.