The Plot Thickens
Now on YouTube where there used to be Spiffs WoW video for Re: Your Brains, there is this message: “This video is no longer available due to a copyright claim by Viacom International Inc.” I’m almost certain there’s no Viacom material in the video, so I’m starting to think this was some kind of mistake – maybe they tagged the wrong video for removal. YouTube hasn’t answered my email, but they have responded with some pretty non-responsive emails to Spiff and a couple other people who wrote in to complain. “The video(s) you posted were in violation of YouTube’s Terms of Use, as reported by users and verified by the YouTube Team.” Right, but…huh?
Aha! Update from Jeremy’s comment, which I’m putting here for better visibility. This could be the explanation:
Yeah, Viacom issued a massive takedown notice to YouTube, and a bunch of user-created content got caught in the crossfire. It seems like they just did a rough search on Viacom property names, and compiled the ENTIRE results into their takedown. So there was probably nothing in Spiff’s video that violated YouTube’s ToU, but some comment or tag that referenced a Viacom property to make it show up in the legal team’s search.
Shirts and Merch
I frequently get emails from people with ideas for shirts, towels, mugs, mousepads, etc. The only thing stopping me from turning them all into a vast and profitable line of JoCo merchandise is the amount of time it takes to set up and organize all the products in CafePress. Here’s what I want:
1. Some way that anyone in the world can upload graphics and design a new product in my store.
2. That product becomes available for everyone else to buy (subject to my approval, just so the graphic isn’t a picture of me without my pants on or something like that). I’d even share some revenue if there was a way to do that, but mostly this is so that I make money and you get the shirts you want.
3. On my site, images of all the products, linked to the songs they’re related to, ordered by popularity, grouped by color, whatever. A vast, ever-changing, user-created treasure trove of merchandise that doesn’t create more work for me.
I spent some time this weekend trying to figure out how to do this. Spreadshirt has an option where the customer can choose their shirt color during checkout, and they have something called a “Designer Spreadshop” that supposedly gives users access to the same shirt design tools that store owners use to design products – I think this would work. But they charge $999 to set this up, which seems a little pricey to me.
CafePress is where all my stuff is now, and they don’t even really have a great collection of shirt colors, let alone something like this. They do have an API, which some people have used to do interesting things. Click-shirt is one of those things, and it comes close, but I’d have to make my CafePress password public, and then you would all steal my money.
I suppose there are some thorny IP issues here, which is probably why this doesn’t exist. Probably nothing that a draconian user agreement wouldn’t solve – I own everything you submit forever, if you infringe on copyright I’m not responsible, etc. But sheesh, I think it would be pretty excellent. Anybody know of some way to do this? Anybody dying to jump into the CafePress API?
Mystery Crackdown
Spiff’s World of Warcraft video for Re: Your Brains has been removed from YouTube for copyright infringement. I don’t know what’s going on, but it sure wasn’t me who complained. If I get any more info I’ll let you know…
The Elusive Label Deal
So Glenn sends me a link to this fellow Scott Andrew’s blog in which he calls for some kind of musical deathmatch involving me. Once and for all, I don’t do deathmatches – I don’t even do painmatches. A minordiscomfortmatch is as far as I’ll go.
But the point is, Andrew links to this NPR story about Dresden Dolls. They tour full time, probably work pretty hard, and apparently make $1500 a month. Wha? Of course their label deal gives them only about a dollar per CD, and I guess when they tour they spend money on a road crew and a bus and stuff like that, because they’re an actual band. But how depressing is that? They’re like, a real band with a label and everything. I make more than that, and I have no idea what I’m doing. How can this be?
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