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I am leaving Vimeo over their scandalous DMCA policy


Andrew Reid
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Look into the recent corporate changes at Vimeo and their parent company, you will see why the culture is changing there. They want to fatten up before going public, they have a new CEO from Harvard and they are chasing subscriptions.

https://www.tubefilter.com/2017/07/20/vimeo-anjali-sud-ceo/

They are trying to go from 70 million subscribers to 100 million.

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1 hour ago, Andrew Reid said:

 They want to fatten up before going public, they have a new CEO from Harvard and they are chasing subscriptions. They are trying to go from 70 million subscribers to 100 million.

I'm sure that alienating their paying subscribers base is a brilliant strategy to achieve this goal.

According to Reuters: "More than half of the Vimeo’s revenue comes from business customers, Vimeo CEO Anjali Sud said"

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On 10/23/2018 at 7:54 PM, Andrew Reid said:

if I wanted to set some cinematography to a Pink Floyd track in the privacy of my own edit suite at home, and not release it, I am free to do that.

I was recruited by the DJ Paul Van Dyk once and he wanted to use my footage over his music. Boot on the other foot. I said yes.

Isn’t there a difference here?

The DJ asked and you said yes. That is essentially you granting a licence/permission to use your cinematography. And even tho’ there was neither a financial component nor a formal legal agreement it certainly had the most basic and important element: respect.

In contrast, did anyone ask Pink Floyd? 

I think your point about the freedom of artistic expression is valid - but plagiarism, copyright infringement or pirating detract from that.

My own experience is irrelevant because only a handful of people will ever see my videos but that notwithstanding I enjoy the process of finding new music to suit (using Audio Network) and paying to use it. That - in a trivial way - rewards and hopefully motivates the musicians to keep exercising their artistic expression. I think it also allows my viewers (the crowd of four) better opportunity to experience (see and hear) the holistic work rather than focus on a well known piece of music.

There is a problem - not so certain what the solution is...

 

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Vimeo sucks a big one, always has. For the base upgrade of $84 a year, you get a whopping 5GB a week. Someone has to break it to them that YouTube has been offering unlimited uploads since...forever, and was like 2-3 years ahead of Vimeo in offering basic things like 4K, again, always free. Vimeo video search is beyond terrible, with very limited filter options. And they do all the most annoying tricks where, rather than add value to premium options, they strip away very basic functionality from the free product, like having to wait in an arbitrarily long queue to get to see your uploaded video, and only 500MB per week, a pathetic sum. Vimeo has the best encoding, but for everything else it's a total scam.

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I thought it was interesting that Vimeo would institute a policy that seemed (at first sight) so evidently against the best interest of their customers (who clearly are looking for a reliable content provider) and therefore against the interest of Vimeo itself.

As I see it Vimeo has two problems.

1) Service providers (ie vimeo) can avoid liability under copyright infringements from their users/customers so long as they meet 'safe harbor' conditions under DMCA. A key condition is that the service provider 'must terminate' repeat copyright infringers from their system (and inform their customers of this policy.)601346051_ClipboardImage(222).thumb.jpg.f14bdef925062dc3369fc129313b6d87.jpg

2) A secondary problem for Vimeo is its underlying business model which relies on 'subscriptions' from its users. A service provider cant really be sued for the copyright infringement of its users if it receives no monetary benefit from them (which in most cases Vimeo will.) Youtube, for instance, would seem in a better position here as it relies on advertising. So it can argue, that as it has a policy to 'demonetize' repeat offenders, it shouldnt be liable.

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the thing is: if these companies, youtube for example, applied these rules to EVERYONE, fairly, the same way, at least i could say, "Well thats just how they are"

but thats not the case at all!!!

if i upload a video – im making one right now – with a copyrighted song that i fairly have no right to upload, it *might* be chosen for monetization by the record label, it *might* be just barred from being uploaded, deleted, who knows?

this is all fun and games until they delete your ENTIRE ACCOUNT. i feel SO bad for people who have wrongly had their channels removed... all that work, all that THEY DID FOR YOUTUBE, all the views, comments, the community interaction, all that shit youtube loves – all gone. no appeal, no process to do anything. its just gone

i recently went through a dmca takedown request due to an a-hole i know who stole my video, and from what ive gathered, if you have a corporate email address (yes) they take you way more seriously, if you "represent a business" they take you way more seriously, and as a lone creator, they dont give  a single fuck about you (shocking)

i got what i wanted because i pursued the issue, but thats emailing a robot

amazingly, you get virtually the same "customer service" from vimeo, despite the fact that you have to PAY them for your account~!

AMAZIN!!!!

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On 10/23/2018 at 11:19 PM, zerocool22 said:

Yeah I have seen numerous complaints about that, I have never had that issue with vimeo but I have with youtube though. 

thats weird, never had that issue with youtube. I could wath youtube on 1mbit, vimeo would poo itself.

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Wistia seems like a much better alternative:

https://premium.wpmudev.org/blog/why-we-moved-from-vimeo-pro-to-wistia-and-why-you-should-too/

On 10/23/2018 at 11:10 PM, webrunner5 said:

Yeah all you need is about 50 times more of these, and employees that are good at roller skating for hot swapping out Hard Drives LoL.

Server.jpg

I agree - but... vimeo is just using amazon for their storage.  but yea, the cost of it all is probably insane

On 10/24/2018 at 10:35 AM, Mark Romero 2 said:

Maybe "gear porn" would count???

this is funny

https://melmagazine.com/en-us/story/the-best-pornhub-videos-that-dont-have-any-porn-in-them

 

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On 10/24/2018 at 5:13 PM, Andrew Reid said:

Look into the recent corporate changes at Vimeo and their parent company, you will see why the culture is changing there. They want to fatten up before going public, they have a new CEO from Harvard and they are chasing subscriptions.

https://www.tubefilter.com/2017/07/20/vimeo-anjali-sud-ceo/

They are trying to go from 70 million subscribers to 100 million.

Well my guess it will head south fast. Instead hitting 100 they might loose a couple of million users. When the best creators left vimeo, the community will collapse as wel. 

Too bad there is no half decent alternative. You could host your own videos, but vimeo is also a source of inspiration that you can quickly search in. I would need to search hours on youtube before hitting a decent vid, instead 5min on vimeo. So I am hoping vimeo will survive this and make vimeo great again. I know storage costs a lot, but there is waaaay too much crap uploads on there. They could create a points system, if you upload decent that are liked and viewed a lot, you get to upload a new video with no restrictions or something. That would lower the amount of crap videos and increase views and likes as you would likely share them a lot more wirh friends and family.

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You beat me to it Andrew, I was thinking of starting a thread on leaving VIMEO,  after 164 video uploads being a paid member since 2011 they send me dmca notices and some threatening messages of this type:

> " You have 5 minutes to download your video due to a copyright strike" sent in the dead of night I am in Greece by the way 7 hours time difference from NY.

>If you do not wish to contest the strikes but are seeking access to your other videos, we are able to place your account into Temporary Access Mode. This will restore your account in a limited capacity for 72 hours so that you are able archive your videos.
However, there are a few caveats: 

1) You may only be granted access if you are not filing a formal counter-notification regarding the strikes on your account. 
2) We can only provide 72 hours of access. Since this is automated, we cannot extend the access period. Any content that wasn’t downloaded may be lost. 
3) The videos will be restored with a restricted privacy setting. They will be locked and only available to you for archival purposes. They will not be publicly available.
4) Per our repeat infringement policy, you may not open any additional Vimeo accounts

So for 3 songs that were in some ancient videos long forgotten not embedded anywhere, one of them Private, they actually HOLD HOSTAGE another 160 videos,.I talked to them and they had the courtesy to allow me to download them over a week but i have to sign off any rights over that..i have left the account in Limbo

What I see is that they are driving out  all the small creators that used to be the paying backbone of Vimeo, they killed the FORUM where voices of members were heard and they are turning VIMEO into a stock footage video gallery (eeeeek).

In the meantime WISTIA is way expensive 100 bucks per month, youtube is a temporary solution..

 

 

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Problem is Vimeo have us by the balls and they know it. A far call from their earlier years, now they have an aggressive new CEO who wants to purge a bunch of users they 'accuse' of copyright infringement, to clear the company of any risk or legality issues in the prelude to being fattened up and sold to an even larger corporation than the one that already owns them.

It stinks.

I have never held in such low esteem a company that I depend on for so much.

We should start our own Vimeo. And keep big business away from the running of it.

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Simple solution to the problem is to stop stealing other people's stuff. If you are a content creator, then create your own content. Just using other peoples creations without permission is not OK, doubly so if you are outraged when others do the same to you. I seem to recall a thread here a while back bemoaning the fact that third parties were doing just that, making it hard for independent film makers to monetize their creations. How is this any different? Just because the shoe is on the other foot does not make any less of a shoe.

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