It would appear that the grisly spectre of corporate greed is once again rampaging through the environs of the internet.
YouTube, former home of free speech and expression, has been clamping down on use of copyrighted material in videos uploaded to the site, and recently Herald Cinema - like so many others - has fallen victim to what can only be described as entirely unreasonable mean-spiritedness.
This bout of unpleasantness comes at a particularly inopportune moment as those kind gentlemen over at Sidewalk saw fit to mention the endeavours of this little weblog on their very own website.
So... to explain.
There was a grand total of ten short films up on the Herald Cinema YouTube Channel, but now only eight are viewable. Four of our films have been subject to action on the part of YouTube - two have been blocked entirely - the shorts entitled "Love Power" and "Street Fighting Man" for using copyrighted material by Dusty Springfield and The Rolling Stones respectively; one has been tagged with an advertisement (the recently posted short entitled "HCHD"), and now, to add insult to injury, our most recent piece, the imaginatively titled "Sunday Herald", has had its audio stripped as it uses 'Linus and Lucy' by The Vince Guaraldi Trio in a deliberate homage to Pat Duffy's 'Second Hand Smoke' section - which, incidentally, has also had its audio stripped.
Luckily, there are people out there with deeper pockets than us and have felt compelled to use the piece in their own work; most notably in Spike Jonze'scommercial for Nissan starring none other than Mark Gonzales:
Brains are currently being racked in an attempt to resolve the situation.
Stay tuned for more information.
