Ok, with Facebook making my updates way too easy, I keep blowing off updating my actual website. I do have the twitter feed on the left so I hope it has kept some people updated.
So, what the heck have I been up to over the last month? For one, been really busy working on the new website for BNVN StormChasingVideo.com and getting things up to speed now that I have some help with it. It’s going to be pretty slick since my vision of what the ultimate stock footage site should be is finally coming true.
I have also been dealing with Youtube Parasites. What is a “YouTube Parasite”, it is someone that has no problem with copyright infringement and will use your work with no regard to Federal Copyright laws.
They are using software that will record your footage from your YouTube Channel while it is playing back at high quality from YouTube to then re-upload on their YouTube Channel to gain views and collect the ad-revenue themselves. We have shut down several YouTube channels over the last month and are always looking for more people ripping off our content.
It’s a high tech video piracy that costs a lot of good content producers a lot of money and wastes our time to enforce our own copyrights. One of the idiots that we busted a few weeks ago was making some serious bank off of ripping off videos and re-posting them to their YouTube Channel that had over 25 Million Views. According to one of the stats websites I used, the 25 Million Views is about $65,000.00 per year in ad-revenue that they pirated off other content producers.
The worst part was they even tried to fight the DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) requests that I sent into YouTube to remove the videos. I was pretty pissed off about the whole deal and was booking a flight to personally go to their city and file a Federal Copyright Injunction against them and go all “Les Grossman” on them.
I was thinking of a way to make this into a national news story and I talked it over with some news producers friends of mine and that was when they said WTF? I told them what was happening with the “YouTube Parasites” and they reminded me that the News Media is always hurting to hold on to revenue and if someone is ripping off their content and directing viewers away from their website and their on line advertisers, they want to know about it not for a story but to sue the crap out of the people ripping them off. The next day, the idiot that was ripping me off and trying to fight the DMCA request got to deal with another “Les Grossman” from Hollywood and their channel ripping off all the video was gone.
The moral to the story is, if you are going to re-post other people’s content to YouTube, you better have some agreement in place or you will get sued if you are making money off the re-posted content.
In other news of what is happening in my life, the May 2012 storm chasing season was pretty much dead. There where a few storms but I did not venture out to spend days on end to chase since there was nothing happening.
I did chase on 5/5/2012, Storm Chase from Mitchell, SD to Ward, MN/
I also chased around home on 5/18/2012 for the Stearns County, MN, Vivid Lightning and huge hail.
And of course I did the 5/20/2012 Eclipse Sunset over central Minnesota.
But the big story for me for the month of May was on 5/28/2012 Raw news footage of Sartell’s Verso paper plant fire, Sartell MN Fire.
The latest chase for me was the 6/17/2012 Minnesota Tornadic Storms Footage that I shot out by Wheaton, MN to just northwest of Montevideo, MN. The storms were pretty cool and per SPC, the Wheaton, MN storm did have two tornadoes on it but I never saw them touch down.
Well, I have a computer to fix, paperwork to work on, a forecast for a possible storm chase later in the day, dive gear check out this week, answer a bunch of emails and a bunch of other stuff I need to find on my notes of what I have to do before next week.
Here are some photos for the blog from the last chase. Waiting for some fool to say it looks like Aliens are landing now.
