Kill Bill and Miltonic Allusion: [some problems]

I wanted to write a brief note letting you know about some problems with the Kill Bill project.

The major influence on Kill Bill is Lady Snowblood. I needed like 8 clips from that movie. Frequently I am told that material I put up on Youtube "matches third party content" but that no action need be taken now. Twice now -- with those two cinema classics Citizen Kane and the Highlander -- embedding has been disabled, but I could still link to it. With Lady Snowblood clips were completely disabled -- as in you could not view them at all. I was sent an email in Japanese. I am not sure what it said but the next time I went into YouTube before I could enter I had to read a letter stating that there was a strike on my account, and press a button saying I understood. A few hours later a second letter went out to me, and a second strike warning went in front of my account -- for more clips as part of that batch of Lady Snowblood uploads. There were a few Lady Snowblood clips on my youtube account unmentioned in either warning, and I felt a third letter was imminent. I third letter would have been a third strike, and the termination of my YouTube account altogether.

There was also an added problem. Even if a third letter was not coming I have many more clips to upload. The strikes against my account did not go away once I deleted the material. So anyone who wanted to make an issue out of an upcoming, or past clip, would cause my account to be disabled.

I had hoped that my keeping the clips private -- that is you had to have the link to view the clip; you could not just search YouTube for the links because you were in the mood to watch The Best of Lady Snowblood -- would keep strikes from coming against me. I was giving out the links on a blog doing academic work. I had also hoped that the short length of many of the clips (one Lady Snowblood clip was 18 seconds) would give me a pass. I had also hoped the fact that I was a an assistant professor doing University grant funded work would give me a pass. But the strikes were not being issued on or acted by people easily contacted. A computer saw that the material on youtube matched material it its databanks and sent a message you youtube computers and those computers sent a message to me and acted against my account.

I could have let them shut down my account and then fought with them about it, as I think I am in the right, but I did not want to deal with it before I got more info on what to do. To be fair to them I did have like 200 clips of other peoples stuff up on youtube and while I was working it into an academic argument, they had no way of knowing that.

So I took down ALL the Kill Bill clips, even for posts already up. I have enough posts in the can to last till the end of May if they go up once a week. I plan for these to still go up, but they are going to have to go up without the clips. This is going to make them less fun, but be assured that I am still working on this project and a bunch of blogs with clips was never the final form this was going to take. I hope to have something fancy to show you eventually, built in part out of the clips on my hard drive. Hopefully putting them in a new and clearer context will help.

Anyway, thanks for bearing with me.