Copyright dispute on youtube (part 2)

About a month ago I posted on my copyright problems with youtube, at the time the Harry Fox Agency had claimed ownership of audio on my video, well that dispute timed out and was released on the 24th of November 2012 and I applied to monetize the video again. And guess what? Another company, this time called UMPG publishing claimed ownership of the audio. I guess this is another one that will just remain 'under review' until it times out on Christmas eve!

Copyright disputes

A while ago I uploaded this little video to my youtube channel.

It's nothing spectacular and it was just some video I had kicking about and it isn't that bad to just delete it. Anyway, I tried to spice it up a bit with some music. Vivaldi - Four Seasons Spring seemed to be a great fit for this video. So I found a copy of this track (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:01_-_Vivaldi_Spring_mvt_1_Allegro_-_John_Harrison_violin.ogg), licensed by Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 1.0 Generic (License available here http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/1.0/deed.en) and finished my video, uploaded it and all was good. I monitized it and that was that. I doubt it ever made a penny from the monitization but I'll never know as that was before the youtube revamp to list Ad Revenue per video. That isn't important anyway.

Some time later it was flagged as "Matched third party content" and the claim was made by CD Baby. At the time I just set the video to private and decided to deal with it later. Later came, about a week and a half ago when I filed my dispute with this claim. I cited the source and license of the music and the claim was released. I tried to enable monitization again on the video and CD Baby claimed ownership, again. So I disputed it again and it was released again. I tried to enable monitization again and this time an anonymous "Rights collecting society" claimed ownership. So once again I disputed the claim and it was released. Once I tried to enable monitization again it was then claimed by APM Music and again I disputed the claim. Turned monitization on again and had another claim for ownership of the music filed. This time by the Harry Fox Agency.

So here I am, 5 disputes into this one video and every time I dispute it another claim is filed.

It does leave me with some questions:

a) Why are claims submitted one by one by different companies?
b) My dispute has been accepted once and nothing has changed in my video - why do I need to submit it again and again for each company?
c) Why is the company involved the only one reviewing these claims?

A bit more on Sketchup ASE exporter for Muvizu

Previously I wrote a piece about a Muvizu ASE Exporter for Sketchup, with download link to it. Today I have a video tutorial for it done!

A big thanks to everyone who has uploaded models to the Muvizu website, it fitted nicely for a village scene!

Credits

3D Assets

Fantasy Cottage, Witches broom, Toons Tent by Dylly

Jack O'Lantern  by Artypikk

Cartoon house by Macharet

Textures

Autumn leaves texture at cgtextures.com

Sound effects and music

Swoosh sound - Rope swoosh 3 by benboncan

Private eye by Kevin MacLoud - www.incompetech.com

Sometime ago Muvizu introduced a unsupported feature; ASE file imports. The feature immediately expanded the possibilities of the software by allowing users to import object (static meshes only) into the application to customise their scenes and animations. In the course of testing this feature I found an ASE exporter for Google Sketchup to the Unreal 3 engine. The original file was called hskp2unr.rb and supports a number of import and export formats - which arn't needed for Muvizu. This was made by a chap called HardPCM, who seems to have disappeared, although his twitter account is still there https://twitter.com/#!/HardPCM

The exporter that he made was extremely useful and stable and made the whole of the Google 3D Warehouse available to anyone with Muvizu, Sketchup and the ASE exporter. The only downside to it was that it would only export the geometry of an object and not the collision mesh and left you editing the ASE file manually to either paste in a generic collision model to use or merge in the exact collision you wanted for your object.

So it go me thinking - why not just update it to allow the collision to be exported as well as the geometry? Well that's what I did. Back in 2010 I updated the code to make a Muvizu ASE Exporter plugin for Muvizu and after testing it for about a year it's now been published for anyone to use.

Download here

The plugin itself is licensed under GNU Lesser General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

All credit goes to HardPCM for the original code.

How do I use it?

Well, just download it from the link above and then copy and past the .rb file in to your Google Sketchup\Plugins folder and start Google Sketchup. Once you have your object ready for export, make it into a component and then either copy and paste the component (making it unique and removing all textures) or build a new object that will be the collision mesh. You probably want to rename your collision object component to include collision in the name as it'll be easier to identify which is which.

Once your ready to export the object, just go to the Plugins drop down menu, and select the export option under the Muvizu ASE export option. Then all you need to do is give your model a file name and select which component is the geometry and which is the collision. It's that simple. I've added an option to export without geometry as well. This lets you use the default collision mesh generated by Muvizu.

Any questions, problems or update suggestions just let me know.

Muvizu ASE Exporter.rb