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I have had enough of Youtube and their clueless copyright bots. Youtube uses a 3rd party program to police videos for copyright infringement. These programs simply match the video and audio of what’s being played against what’s already copyrighted and block the content automatically, unaware of the nuances of fair use laws.

Fair use allows people other than the copyright owner to copy part or, in some circumstances, all of a copyrighted work, even where the copyright holder has not given permission. So examples of this include using movie clips for Criticism & Commentary. Since Rubber Duck Theater often reviews movies, almost all of our episodes have been flagged by youtubes algorithmic copyright cops.

Each episode gets a message like: “Your video may include content that is owned by a third party.” You can try challenging this objection, which I’ve found to be useless or you can “acknowledged third party content”, which places annoying ads on the video at the very least. Sometimes the video is completely blocked from viewers.

Rubber Duck Theater does not have a single legitimate copywrite infringement, yet youtube has marked our channel as “Not in a good standing”.

Now, all of our new episodes are being rejected (length of video is too long). They have limited uploaded videos to 15 minutes and I can’t change this because we are “Not in a good Standing” with youtube! Seriously!

Youtube needs to fix their overactive copyright policing. Until then you’ll find full episodes of Rubber Duck Theater on Vimeo and also embedded in this website.

On another note; I’ve stopped using Amazon to serve up the videos because of buggy video players; some people were having trouble viewing the videos via Amazon. It’s easier and works better to embed Vimeo files.

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After Blip.tv gave most of it’s members the boot (see previous post), we had to find a new host for Rubber Duck Theater. We set up an account on YouTube, but YouTube is over-the-top with their copy write filters and either places ads on videos or blocks them entirely even for videos that don’t actually break any copy write laws. When you do movie reviews, you are allowed to use small snipits of movies. You can challenge YouTube, but that’s a nuisance. We did manage to upload 42 of our 45 episodes so far, but still not the best solution.

We then tried Vimeo. Their free account was useless because there was only enough space for a couple of videos, even though our online episodes are only between 300-400MB each. So we paid $60 for their “Plus” account, but this account only allows users to upload 5GB per week. A time consuming task uploading 45 episodes. But we are up to episode #31 as of today, and so far no copy write issues like YouTube. Vimeo also has a pro account, but it’s more than we want to spend for our public access non-profit videos.

Then we thought why not host the videos ourselves and not deal with these video sharing sites? We already have several hosting accounts for various projects. But this can really put a strain on hosting bandwidth. Our best solution so far is to host the actual videos on Amazon’s servers. Amazon offers lots of server space and very it’s very inexpensive. So, we’ve uploaded our episodes to an Amazon Web Service (AWS) “S3” account and linked the videos to this blog powered by WordPress on a 1and1.com hosting account. It’s nice to have full control over our content and no annoying ads to deal with.

Our Community TV station is also working on videos on demand, so we hope to have our show at https://www.grafton-ma.gov/grafton-community-television/pages/streaming-video as well. Still more work to do on this site and also need to update our Facebook account, which is all linked to blip.tv. So, that is where we are at now.

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