A few days ago, I’ve shared with you the fact that the short animated movie: Logorama made by H5, was available in full length online and was a bit surprised as Autour de Minuit (rights owner) always tried to keep it private and I was wondering if they changed their mind. I was in touch with them during LeWeb conference where this video was projected on huge screens on every breaks and I wanted to be able to share it with you, Autour de Minuit, the rights owner told me that mainly for obvious legal reasons they couldn’t and it was unshareable online.
Actually, after having a brief discussion today with Elsa Chevallier from Autour de Minuit, she just confirmed that this video should not and MUST NOT be shared online for 2 main reasons, first of all it was a copyrighted piece of art made by H5 on their free time and took them a very long time and a lot of hours of hard work to make it, 6 years have been necessary to make that film, but more than that as this video have been made with more than 2,500 logos of the world top brands and that they never asked the right to use them (which was humanly impossible to do it anyway IMO) and more than that, the image of those brands is severly « heckled » so they could be sued by all of them ending in a certain death for that company.
So what’s happening there and why Autour de Minuit might not be able to won this battle against the Web community?
On January 19th, Peter Gabor decided to publish it on Vimeo and spread it on his blog, of course Autour de Minuit shut it down in 48h, but Peter Gabor didn’t only published it on Vimeo he also hosted the original file on his personal website and shared the URL to download it through its Twitter account (I’m not gonna give it to you obviously).
As he publicly shared the URL, a lot of people have downloaded the movie. The result is that some website such as YoungPlanner or BlogOpub put their hands on it and decided to host it on their own website in order to provide it to their community and in the same occasion allow other bloggers to access the code to republish it on their own blog without asking the right owners to do so.
Unfortunatly for Autour de Minuit and H5 that made the clip, they already lost a battle but they’re about to lose the war too, because if it’s not already the case, I’m pretty sure that by the end of the week the full length movie will be available on all the P2P and torrent website, and there is no way that the rights owner get their hands back on controlling the distribution of that movie.
What’s making me sad about this story, despite the fact it’s showing the power of the multitude compared to the single one and remind me the the case of Digg and the blue-ray hacking code, its that piece of art, and I weight my words, was NOT made to be a commercial product in the first place but it was the materialization of an old dream by the H5 company holders. And that some stupid folks seeking for short term online glory might put those artists in a VERY difficult position.
UPDATE: with its Oscar won last night, people are publishing all over the web the full length movie since the past 2 days, that is so lame.
UPDATE 2: If you’re in the USA, UK, Germany and Canada you can find Logorama in full length on iTunes
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