What happened to the video uploads? Will they return?

I've been procrastinating on it for some time, sorry about that folks.  OK time to explain what happened...

The Beginning;

So a while back AOL had started its own competitor to youtube called Uncut.  I had made quite a few friends with various folks at AOL.  One of my friends markbach had visited the 7 Bamboo.  He was taken by my plight of trying to run the karaoke here above board without piracy.  I explained how our video system worked, and with his skill he could easily make it work with Uncut video so folks could access their individual videos.

Mark was kind enough to sit down and take some time out to do some coding to automate the entire process, and within weeks we were filling uncutvideo with content on a daily basis. 100 videos, 1000 videos, 10000 videos.  We had become a content producing machine.  Although 7 Bamboo didn't necessarily have 1 extremely popular video, we had enough people hitting the Uncut site that 7 Bamboo had become the most popular search term on the site.

Bad times for AOL

AOL was swirling around the toilet like a turd on it's way down the sewer.  While they were the #1 ISP in the early modem days, people stopped using modems and started going to broadband.   AOL tried to adapt its business model by spreading itself into every nook and crannie of the net, copying what other successful sites had done.  Unfortunately for them, most folks looked at AOL's poor fascimiles of successful websites (youtube vs uncut) as just a last desperate attempt to save themselves.    Somewhere along the line, AOL started cutting services.  AOL blogs died, as did Uncut.  

We were given an option to move the videos off uncut to another site (motionbox or something) but motionbox wanted to charge for hosting the videos.

So we decided to trash it.  There was no saving the 10,000 videos we had done so far. I asked Mark for one last push of code so we could start uploading to youtube.  He had already worked on the last bit of code for weeks and was never under any obligation to even do that for us.  This was all out of the kindness of his heart.

Mark did it, and with little to no interruption we were filling youtube with videos of crooners and screamers alike.

Monarchy and the dead kill us on youtube.

After we had hit about 1200 videos on youtube I got a DMCA takedown notice from Prince.   Apparently Prince has spiders crawling youtube(programs that look for keywords).  If the spider got a positive, it would issue a DMCA takedown notice.  It came across Danny singing purple rain.  I tried to counter his claim by saying that the song Danny had sung was from our DKG collection, which price gave permission for karaoke use before the Disney/ABKO case, and before the entire Sync license issue ever existed for karaoke, and that it should be grandfathered in. To my dismay youtube took his side.  Danny singing purple rain got removed and our account got a "Troublemaker" flag on it.

A few weeks later I got another DMCA notice from a company called "Web Sheriff".  Apparently Web Sheriff operates spiders for whoever owns Van Morrisons copyright, and they were issueing a DMCA on someone singing brown eye girl.  Again I tried to argue, but this time youtube just suspended our account, and removed all the videos we had uploaded until then.

So now we're back at square one.  Prince, you're a great artist but what you did here is bad karma,  we pay our ASCAP/BMI/SESAC and we don't pirate a single karaoke song.  Same goes for you guys Web Sheriff.

So will they return?  I dunno.  Facebook does offer some interesting features that *might* be able to circumvent DMCA rules.  For instance, a person could add the 7 Bamboo as a friend, and 7 Bamboo could post video's to an individuals profile, and that doesn't necessarily have to be shared with the world.  Copyright has no foothold in personal use, so as long as performance videos are not publicly available and only available to the singers friends, we might have a leg to stand on.

Mark has since left AOL, and is currently lacking in time to continue the process.  I'm hoping that one of these years if he gets the inspiration he'll adapt his stuff to work with Facebook video.  To all of the 7 Bamboo customers though, you guys gotta understand this is like getting punched in the face twice for trying to do a good deed.   Maybe some words of encouragement (or boobs in the face) might inspire him to work on it again.

KARAOKE IS HARDCORE!!!

--toq