Lemming Archive on YouTube
26th April 2014 - 3rd August 2016
Out of the blue I received an email yesterday evening telling me that the account has been taken down. The 2 strikes I picked up courtesy of the BBC for the Glastonbury videos were still in play, and now Skynet who are responsible for the Werchter 2016 footage have lodged their own complaints. I can tell you that these folks aren't playing around. As a result I instantly hit my 3 strike limit and that's it, I'm afraid. The account was taken offline and with it the hundreds of clips I was sharing. You may have noticed that the Archive appeared to be gone too for a while there last night. It was. I was locked out and couldn't gain access to it any more. I'm not sure if there's a connection there but it seems like an awfully big coincidence, doesn't it? Luckily, after some frantic emailing I did manage to get that back online but now, of course, it's full of dead links. I'm in a similar spot to when the Feds closed Megaupload down way back when. I'm trying not to take all of this personally but it does feel like a terrible slight on my character, that people see the above message when they now try to view the videos I upped to YouTube. I do still have a fairly decent set of morals, contrary to what you may have read.
I appealed the decision to evict me from YouTube, but it failed.
I appealed the decision to evict me from YouTube, but it failed.
The irony of all this is that the Werchter videos, which are what have ended everything, have been ridiculously popular since I put them up. They were running second only to Pinkpop 2014 (which was closing in on half a million views). They'd been online for a full month with no hint of there being a problem. The Pulse had become the most popular clip of that bunch and had easily sailed past 7,000 views. I guess they were just biding their time and building a false sense of security which, sadly, I totally bought into. The statistics I have show that people were really getting into the festival shows, much more than the older material I've posted (3 out of the top 5 all time post counts are from 2016).
I know that, realistically speaking, there was always a possibility of this happening given the kind of stuff I post, but I readily accepted that risk. I think I foolishly still considered that everything I was sharing was between myself and other fans like you, and that we were all tucked away quietly in a Back Room (ho ho!) of the internet. Apparently not. From the minute I began putting material on YouTube back in April of 2014, there's been problems. The music started reaching a wider audience, which was exactly why I did it, but that brought with it the downside of lots of scrutiny from people I wouldn't normally have in my orbit. The BBC hitting me with 2 strikes over Glastonbury 2016 really set this in motion, and Werchter has provided the kill shot.
So that's that.
The great experiment of taking the Archive overground has backfired and now it's time to take it all back into the shadows again. The idea of doing all of this by torrents is something I've looked into, but I have serious reservations. When the BBC got annoyed about the Glastonbury clips on YouTube they simply had the videos taken down. If I was torrenting, and they came after me for that, it would undoubtedly be a lot more legal in nature and could involve those who downloaded from me being looked at too. Putting other fans at risk is not something I want. Ever. That's not why I set all of this up. The Archive is supposed to be somewhere you can just visit, grab whatever you want and then split. So it's time for another re-think.
At the moment I'm going to wait a few days for the existential crisis and the general mood of "Oh Woe is me! What's the point of it all?" to pass so that I can think more clearly, and get busy replacing the links. Streaming the videos is still the way forward, I think, because it means you can watch them on the go rather than having to got through the mechanics of downloading everything. So I'm going to look at other options and see what I can do. I've been here before, I'll figure this out.
At the moment I'm going to wait a few days for the existential crisis and the general mood of "Oh Woe is me! What's the point of it all?" to pass so that I can think more clearly, and get busy replacing the links. Streaming the videos is still the way forward, I think, because it means you can watch them on the go rather than having to got through the mechanics of downloading everything. So I'm going to look at other options and see what I can do. I've been here before, I'll figure this out.
Thanks a lot for your support and your kind words. That there's an audience which obsesses over this stuff as much as I do makes it worth the occasional misery. I appreciate the band, and I appreciate all of you. We move forward.
drew ;)
