How has the AMV landscape changed?

[Rider4Z]

i can't see myself issuing a take down notice of one of my mash-ups. if i did then i would have to issue one for myself considering i own neither source

but thanks for your guys' input on the youtube issue. i respect your opinions even if i don't necessarily share them.

[MimS]

Stop complaining about having your AMVs stolen, you're not the ones who made the animes so basically we're all thieves.
(On another but still related subject : that's pretty much why I don't want to win any money from this hobby thanks to contests or else 'cause I use a work that isn't mine.)

[Kionon]

To address YouTube, once Kionon got banned, I decided to never make another account. I have had my videos put up by others, but ultimately, I am not popular enough for anyone to steal my videos the way others have had theirs stolen. So, aside from a few ridiculously desperate people, worrying about having my AMVs stolen on YouTube is not really practical. I'm more concerned about people sending stolen videos to contests, and I've had that happen too.

I barely use YouTube as it is. Surprisingly, only for MLP episodes, the rare music video, and when someone links something in #amv, otherwise I don't visit the site much at all.

YouTube has some serious weaknesses as a community and archive for AMVs. Or, for that matter, any focus on video-oriented communities.

Concurred. But that isn't what YouTube was designed to be, regardless of their sad attempts to promote creativity. It's all about consumption. Passive consumption.

These weaknesses are:

• There's no promotion of a community as a whole; all you get is a comment feed. Only a small number of people at the top get any sort of significant exposure. You'll find communities based around YouTube channels in e.g. Skype chat rooms, but you won't find anything that ties them together aside from other scattered channels.
• Automated takedown and banning systems. These make establishing any sort of long-term presentation of AMVs impossible. Making additional accounts on YouTube to get around this is a standard practice, but it's also batshit insane.
• Automated advertising systems. This isn't quite as bad as takedowns, but it's still annoying.

All reasons I decided not to return to YouTube. Ultimately, making additional accounts paints a target on your back. If you continue to persist, eventually you're going to show up on the system as a high profile infringer. A note too, it wasn't the record labels that got me banned. It was Ghibli. And I live in Japan. And our copyright laws just got stricter. I have legitimate concerns about getting into real trouble here, because I'm dealing with copyrighted material in the country of origin where, since I live here, I am directly subject to the laws in question.

The .org has done a very poor job in demonstrating the impact of those problems for AMVers and that it has remedies for those problems.

The Org has done a very poor job of advertising itself as a place where these problems are remedied. I take partial blame for this, as I was part of a movement which was very concerned about the explosive growth of the Org around 2004-2006. I think many of us from the first generation were very concerned with making so much noise that we attracted too much attention and found ourselves in real trouble.

This viewpoint no longer applies. We are much too small of a fish in a much, much expanded pond of possible copyright infringement because of widespread video upload sites like YouTube and Vimeoh, and streaming sites like LiveStream, SlipstreamTV, etc. For a few years, we were the monolith which rose out of chaotic AMV distribution modes, mostly ftp servers, studio websites, basic peer to peer like morpheus, kazaa, winmx, and of course, at convention DVD/CD hand offs.

Now, the landscape has broken down again into chaos. Multiple international sites, the video upload sites, and plenty of us still have fservs, ftps, and studio websites. Our original mission to catalog all AMVs ever is dead. Has been dead for years now. However, I think we can agree that there is a new mission, which involves a much general higher quality of AMVs catalogued and stored here, as well as the community which generates that higher quality.

Here's how I think .org can remedy the above problems:

• It's much easier to promote a sense of a single community when you limit your focus. The Lip Flapper, active twitter feed, Facebook page, and site contests are an excellent start. I'm working on technical mechanisms to give those and similar activities more impact, e.g. real-time listings of active forum topics and new page layouts that give contests and special events enormous amounts of room on a page.

I'd like to see the return of Review, but frankly, I'm going to need a wider variety of possible moderators. I can't run it alone.

[*] .org is a smaller target. YouTube has automated takedown systems and has to deal with tons of takedown notifications/counter-notifications a day. .org has had to deal with, uh, a few. (AFAIK, the only one that was made public is the Wind-Up Records issue.)

Concurred, which is why my own fear of reprisal has very much altered over the last few years. We simply aren't worth it.

[*] .org can be reengineered to provide durability for videos. That's actually where a lot of my .org-related work has gone over the past couple months: devising a system that can keep serving videos even in the face of takedowns by distributing the .org database and application code across multiple locations and owners. Takedown is like unrecoverable object loss, and an event like FBI shutdown is really not much different than catastrophic hardware failure. There's technical measures to deal with both. (Now, technical measures alone won't get us to a point where AMVs are out of legal limbo, but they're needed to keep on the pressure to effect the social and legal changes to protect AMVs.)[/list]

I'd like to see this, but I'd also like to hear the admins chime on this. They are historically a very conservative bunch, and this is a fairly significant paradigm shift. One I agree with, and I think is only logical, but one that might make some of the admins skittish. Not to mention, Phade still casts a very, very long shadow over decisions which fundamentally alter the functioning of the Org, even on the backend. He might not be onboard.

We can advertise these as advantages and (once some more work has been done) demonstrate that we have a better solution than YouTube for AMVs. I think after that word will spread on its own.

How do you suggest advertising in the initial stages?

.org also needs a lot of work to whip it into shape. One concrete example: entering a new video. Do that on YouTube, and then try it on the .org. On YouTube it's a two-step process that you can execute entirely in your web browser. On the .org, it's eight steps -- six in your browser, one in an FTP client, and another step back in your web browser. It's a lot of obstacles for no goddamn reason.

Are you at all concerned that will open the floodgates and impact not only quality (which you addressed), but also cost?

[Kionon]

Stop complaining about having your AMVs stolen, you're not the ones who made the animes so basically we're all thieves.
(On another but still related subject : that's pretty much why I don't want to win any money from this hobby thanks to contests or else 'cause I use a work that isn't mine.)

Do not concur with this. Transformative, derivative works are not theft. This is especially why we strongly encourage the purchase of all source material. I didn't steal. I bought copies of the sources. My works are there to express fandom and creativity and to enhance the experiences surrounding the original sources. They are not there to serve as a substitute, and they certainly are not there to make personal profit for myself.

[Kionon]

Case in point:

[butterflo]

The only reason I don't prefer Youtube is that I can't replace my videos. Vimeo is fine with me, and they rarely issue takedowns
Same applies to org. Most of my works are never finished because I like to keep editing and experiment with them.

Although my statements could be wrong, I think the major problem with Youtube system and overall AMV landscape is that the general audience somehow managed to mix popularity with quality.
Just because some mash-up vid got 100000s of views doesn't necessarily mean it excels in quality, It only means popularity. Put it simple, nudity gives you 10x more views.
(not to be taken as an excuse though, as this does not mean less views = wtfmyvidisawesomeandpplarestupid )

I can go further and question the definition of creativity itself. Take Puella Magi and 5cm as an example. They are overdone, but they are also great sources to begin with. I've begun editing after I watched Puella Magi and left in awe, and there are those animes which provide enough inspiration in the first place to be an editor. This will lead to the source be overdone, and consequently it will be exhausted so the anime doesn't feel new or creative anymore.
There can't be much new combinations after the source is somewhat quite used. This can be partially because of editing skills, but then the source also has its limits because that is the nature of amv.

[MimS]

Kionon, some of us do buy animes, it happens I buy some of them myself but in the balance, "animes used in videos" compared "animes I bought", the result is not even. To make AMV is not necesarily about expressing fandom but I already gave my op about it on another thread some time ago...
Btw I don't mean people want to make profit thanks to them, I don't think anybody had such an idea but there are contests giving money to winners

[Kionon]

Kionon, some of us do buy animes, it happens I buy some of them myself but in the balance, "animes used in videos" compared "animes I bought", the result is not even. To make AMV is not necesarily about expressing fandom but I already gave my op about it on another thread some time ago...

Link, because I would much rather answer your charges in detail, if I can.

The problem is, you called everyone, every single person here (and probably all AMV editors ever) "thieves." Not only do I think this is inaccurate, I think it's offensive, and ultimately I think it is dangerous. If we have editors going around "admitting" to be thieves like you just did, this will seriously complicate attempts to convince others of a fair use interpretation of copyright law which supports AMVs and transformative, derivative works in general. Comments like that may seem innocent, but they can be highly damaging.

Yes, it's true, the hobby has (since broadband and bittorrenting came along) had a serious problem with repeated, blatant, and widespread violation of our ethical standards and rules to be in compliance with fair use. However, never, EVER has to Org publicly condoned such behavior, and some of us, such as myself, are practically rabid about maintaining those standards and reminding people of those rules. Being from an era where people captured from VHS or LD, and were only beginning to use DVDs, it was simply my habit already to purchase the source material, both anime and music. This is a problem with your generation, not mine. If you find your peers are disobeying the Org's "prime directive" of not using downloaded footage (unless, given recent technology, it was purchased for download), then you need to step up your game in policing your own, and not accusing the rest of us of theft.

AMVs should be labors of love. Love for the source materials. You don't show love for the source materials by screwing over the creators. Now, I have my own serious, SERIOUS issues with the anime and music industries, but I never want the creators I meet fairly often to ever think I've hurt their bottom line. Far from it, and I am always very proud to show AMVs to creators. Most recently, I showed Scintilla's A Raven's Pride to Princess Tutu creator Itoh Ikuko. I have yet to receive any kind of negative reaction. Quite the opposite. However, I cannot imagine doing this if I knew that the sources had been pirated.

My apologies if you are bothered by my verbosity, but this is one of my pet peeves. As long as we abide by the ethical standards which have been in operation since the site's founding, we are not doing anything wrong.

[Invirulent]

Amv's are art.

At least to me. Were i to shoot a video tomorrow of my life, of things i do daily, things i will do in my future, things i have done, and put that video on a social media outlet, it would be because i wanted the world to see it. It would be because i wanted everyone to know what it was, who i was. I would want to show the world something they've never seen before, a piece of something that they could get lost in, a value they could appreciate, regardless of their own lives.

If i was to write a story, (which i do, i am, in real life, a writer) and publish it, it would be because i would want the world to read it, to become spellbound by it, snagged in it's ever spinning strings of compelling plot, of intriguing character. I would want them to forget who they were as they read it, as they fell into it's voluminous depths.

Musicians. Painters. Writers. Poets. Directors, Actors, Comedians, Sculptors, even Editors. Editors, the sculptors of media. Artists. People who look up at a world and say "Look, look what can be made from something simple. Look what i can make out of something i found. I took this rock, and made a statue. I took this berry, and made a picture. I took these pictures, and made a film. I took this film, and added music.

To make is to be seen. To be an artist. I feel no guilt for what i am, for my compulsion to show the world what i can do. And i know, in my heart, that the artists who create the shows i work with, would not be angry with me for what i do. Like me, they want to show the world something. Like me, they value the ability to show another human a place outside themselves, a wonder they can't replicate on their own.

The laws in place prohibiting the use of video without the artist's consent is meant for people who would sell it illegally, or massively reproduce it on a large scale. It is not aimed at the small timers, like us. But i have found during the course of making my amv's, many of which have had over 100k views, that the MORE attention i get, the LESS the company's that own these amv's seem to want to stop it. They seem to realize that any press is good press. I have always included in my videos all of the copyright information for the animes contained within, and will continue to do so. So far the only legal ramification i have suffered is the banning of my videos in various foreign countries. My videos are still widely viewed. (or were, before i deleted them.)

The only other problem i suffered was the placement of ads on any videos i had with an over 100k viewing count.

My main point is, however, that were someone to take that video of me, the one i mentioned earlier, of my life, take it, cut it into pieces, put it to music, and re post it on the the internet, i would be honored. Were someone to take my books, cut them up into pieces, pick the parts they liked and make a poem of it, i would be amazed. As an artist, i can appreciate art. And i will not censor anyone elses, nor mine, no matter their methods.

As for "Old school" being "dead". There is no such thing. Time, to us as human beings, is an infinite loop. We have no idea when it will end, nor when it began. We can only smile and go for the ride. Any time is a good time to start something, and there will always be purists who prefer their older methods to newer ones. Soon, this age will become "Old school." And will it die? I don't think so. It will always be there, under our skin, like the music of Frank Sinatra, Madonna, Johnny cash. Not dead. Just waiting. Waiting to be remade, waiting to be reborn.

For truly, this is an age of art, no?

[MimS]

Well Kionon, you're just making big deal about me teasing people claiming they own their AMVs. In your case it is right but in most of other cases it's not. I really respect and admire the way you work, it's just not mine, I have no problem editing animes I don't buy. Yes I am somehow a thief though I do buy animes as much as I can (as I do buy my music or else you know) : should I stop editing 'cause I don't buy them all? Don't think so. Anyway, as I already told before, I can edit for the pleasure of editing and not for the pleasure of making a tribute. AMVs can also be about expressing some precise ideas thanks to animes...
Well basically I wasn't pointing Org or you directly anyway but editors in general. I doubt Tyler owned all animes in Jihaku, Qwaqa in Pencilhead, Ileia and all of her AMVs... and well, illegal or not, I appreciate they didn't care about it 'cause they released great videos. Just, knowing it could be illegal, don't say you own your vid, it's just some creative cool stuff ("you" not being anyone particularly).
Dunno if I'm really clear.