CFL Decides To Shut Down Cool YouTube Channel Promoting Its Product For Free
from the what-are-you-without-fans? dept
For sports fans in general, one of the great benefits of social media sites, particularly Twitter, has been the way highlights are shared across those platforms, both by individuals and, more commonly, by the leagues and teams themselves. Both Major League Baseball (MLB) and the National Basketball Association (NBA) have been particularly good at this, filling up timelines with amazing highlights nearly as they happen. It’s been great for promoting both products, with MLB’s Advanced Media division really driving more people to the sport with this sort of content.
You all remember the Canadian Football League (CFL)? If not, and you’re a football fan, the league’s talent is actually quite good. That being said, the CFL does a terrible job of promoting itself and remains a niche league to say the least. And you know what doesn’t help with that? How about when the league shuts down a fan who went out of his way to promote CFL content to the masses when the league didn’t bother to.
One of the largest independent YouTube channels featuring CFL content no longer exists after the league recently claimed a number of its videos due to copyright violations. Adam Stevens is the creator of CFL Mixtapes, a digital platform that features elaborately edited highlight reels of some of the league’s biggest stars. He has over 1,000 followers on Instagram, including a number of big-name CFL players such as Bo Levi Mitchell, Charleston Hughes, and Willie Jefferson.
“Before then, I wasn’t really a CFL fan, I barely watched any,” Stevens told 3DownNation via telephone. “But in 2021, when I really started watching it, I really liked it and I saw that there was no videos on Instagram about it. I just started doing that.”
Notably, Stevens is a teenager who just grew into being a fan of the CFL. While he started this all on Instagram, he then created a YouTube channel for his custom-made highlight reels as well. That YouTube channel had several hundred subscribers and tens of thousands of views. Not small, but not huge, either. All of that content served essentially to promote the CFL and came with a disclaimer that Stevens did not own the content and wasn’t affiliated with the league.
Then, recently, the CFL suddenly flagged three videos for copyright strikes and the channel was shut down. This coincides with the CFL suddenly getting into the YouTube video highlights game itself, which almost certainly precipitated the strikes.
Stevens has contacted the league through Instagram, Twitter, and email regarding the claims, though he has not received a response. Though he is aware that he had no legal right to the video clips he used in his edits, Stevens was hopeful that his content would help raise awareness regarding the quality of football the CFL has to offer.
“We need to let the world know how good the talent is in this league. It’s really under the radar,” he said. “Before I was a fan, I thought it was horrible league and the players weren’t any good. But no, there’s some really good players and people kind of started realizing that and I think this is a good way to show it.”
This is absolutely asinine. Sure, the CFL can do this under copyright law… but why in the actual hell would it want to? There are plenty of other avenues the league could pursue in this case. It could simply ignore the infringement and enjoy the free promotion. It could work out a cheap or free licensing structure to make the content legit. Hell, it could try to figure out some way to employ Stevens, or contract with him, now or in the near future if his age is a concern.
But instead, out come the copyright strikes and the channel goes down. In theory, this could actually piss off the fans who followed Stevens’ channel, sullying the reputation of the league with those fans.
Talk about a fumble.
Filed Under: adam stevens, cfl mixtapes, copyright, highlight reels, promotion
Companies: cfl
Comments on “CFL Decides To Shut Down Cool YouTube Channel Promoting Its Product For Free”
Well, the CFL was already irrelevant, now they are insuring it stays that way.
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A global network was already irrelevant.
We can see the transition happening already. With the mention of a Taiwan conflict, the global Internet is the 1st thing to go.
And regarding the article, CFL lightbulbs were already replaced :/
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OK, that nails it, this is a bot.
Pft, Americans.
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I take it you’re joking, because this is the Canadian Football League which plays Canadian Football (which is the Canadian version of Gridiron Football, the other being American Football).
There’s nothing “American” about this.
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Canada is in North America.
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I know, but I know of no Canadian who calls themself an American.
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It’s the Americans commenting on the CFL that I am referring to.
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Ah, my apologies, then.
Re: Re: Re:2
No worries, I can see how it would be ambiguous.
They could have just asked him to desist if they are so worried the he did a better job than they might. And/or yes, hired him for his skill. At least he wouldn’t have strikes and a channel erased, i’m sure he would have removed it willingly and promoted the CFL channel.
But stupid is gonna stupid.
Reinforces the CFL’s place in pro football hierarchy: still where US college players go when they couldn’t even get a tryout with an NFL team.
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It’s still a better game than the NFL. Less likely to kill its players, too.
NFL play, on the crushed field and with the extra down, has about the same amount of dynamic play as baseball.
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if you don’t want your youtube channel obliterated with copyright strikes, you shouldn’t post other people’s videos without first obtaining licenses to the material.
meshpage has something even better. It rejects the video file format, so that it becomes technically impossible to post someone elses video file to the site. We also forbid end users from posting any content to the site, to ensure that end user content does not mess with our marketing material.
Instead of those, we let end users host their 3d models and other content on their own web sites. This decentralised approach makes it more resistant to RIAA/MPAA legal paperwork site-closing actions than maintaining centralized web site, but it also forces our end users to obtain their own popularity instead of relying of popularity of the centralized server setup.
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Tero, Tero, Tero. In all the years we’ve both been active selling our copyrighted works, I’ve made more money than you and I have a creative commons license on my music.
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My mom also made more money than me, so you shouldn’t be so quick to brag about your money situation.
This basically means that you’re a slave. I know that slaves built the pyramids and when the task was finished they felt job well done, but if the management do not bother to pass along perks and rewards for the well done job and the families need to starve even though the job was done properly, something is wrong with the companies that support the activity.
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What?
Also, pyramid workers were mostly skilled, paid labor, and they also did it out of serious religious devotion. Further, pyramids were just one of several types of ritual burial for divine royalty, never minding all the temples. Quite a large and long-lived cultural industry, not a lot of slaves involved.
But again, what? Which route through what alternate universe did you take to get from A to B? Was that through the non-sequitur universe?
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Re: Re: Re:2
It has the following elements:
1) software license is creative commons
2) thus your customers use it without paying compensation
3) thus your authors do not receive their compensation
4) but authors still spent tons of time creating it
5) thus authors can be called slaves, since they work without compensation
6) some authors choose being a slave since it benefits the society
7) that pattern has well known problem that without compensation, the activity is bound to stop when your slave runs out of money and society stops supporting his expenses
8) thus all creative commons, open source and free software is unstable, i.e. the authors need to disappear at some point because they cannot get their living expenses covered by creating that software
9) this problem has broken software market completely and the whole market has the same problem
10) at some point, this “bubble” is going to explode to their face
Re: Re: Re:3
Explain away all those creators making a full time living while giving their videos away on YouTube.
Re: Re: Re:4
The problem is that this “making full time living while giving videos away” is relatively rare operation compared to the overall number of people involved in the space. Basically 98% of people are not making any money or are losing tons of money and have to get the money from another business.
This 98% vs 2% idea is very similar to the normal pyramid schemes. Only the topmost people get any money and rest of the market is losing.
Youtube clearly have this problem.
Re: Re: Re:3
Boiled down to its core, your entire argument is claiming that you can’t compete because someone else charges less money than you do. There’s an argument to be made whether ruthless corporate undercutting will become unsustainable in the future, to be certain. But giving you several million dollars for a sad replica of Blender will not solve that problem.
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Re: Re: Re:4
It’s not just “someone else”. If some random person charges less, it doesn’t matter if my customers cannot find that someone else.
But the reality is that the whole market is broken in that way. The software prices are approaching zero in the whole market, and customers are not willing pay the prices.
It’s called “market failure”, when the market as a whole cannot support all its authors.
Re: Re: Re:5
Yes, that is one possible outcome of the free market making decisions. Not all attempts to undercut prices succeed.
Does it mean the market is broken? You’d have to petition the government to make a case, but I doubt they’ll give much notice to a madman who lives 15km from the nearest human.
It’s not the responsibility of the market or the government to make sure everyone has their dream career.
Re: Re: Re:6
I think it’s worse than that. My home computer is serving meshpage’s web pages with a mere 24Mbps connection, so if there’s 5 people connecting to the server at the same time, the connection is ddossed already. So when everyone is usa is wondering why their internet is so slow, one reason might be that the connection goes through my home computer.
Re: Re: Re:7
Thanks for constantly giving more reasons why nobody is using Meshpage, or why nobody should use Meshpage.
The fact that they have to connect to a random Finnish egomaniac’s system to do anything remotely useful is a sufficient disincentive, and also explains why you’ve never bothered showing your software to the target audience you’ve lied multiple times about.
Re: Re: Re:8
Creating those mansions that I requested is possible without constantly connecting to meshpage. The builder tool works without connection to meshpage, although it needs some hosting service for the web deployment. So you cannot use that as a reason to not use meshpage.
If a small download is too much for you, you should stop using computers and move to a forest.
Re: Re: Re:5
Red Hat is a billion $ company, and it competes with copies of its own operating system. It also also complies with the open source licenses, pushing changes upstream, and making its own software open source.Add to that, it supports two free distributions with infrastructure and engineering support. That may have a lot to do with the support that it offered its customers, as support was what it is actually selling.
Failure to sell is almost always a case of having a product that nobody in the market wants.
Re: Re: Re:6
There’s only two ways to fix this problem:
1) either jump to completely different product
2) or do incremental improvements to the quality of the existing product
I’ve chosen the second approach. I think markets for 3d engines are much better than the available other alternatives like creating computer games. Still we have to compete with things like blender, unity, unreal, godot etc, but the number of competitors are completely different than with computer games where every half year time, there will be an output of 3200 computer games in the marketplace.
So the numbers game should be benefitting me as an engine developer.
Re: Re: Re:7
I said almost always, but in your case it may be your personality, that is being a troll, that drives away interest.
Re: Re: Re:8
So this is an admission from you that the market is not interested in the technology that I have built, but instead they are staring at some trolling on techdirt? You gotta be kidding us? Why would some trolling be important when I have something significantly more powerful to offer, i.e. the actually working technology.
It’s no wonder that markets go to all kinds of evil scams, when they only look that the ceo is wearing the same kind of suit than steve jobs, and make their investment decisions based on that, instead of actually evaluating the technology that is available. Given that they didn’t check Theranos blood testing startup technology until years and years after the investments, they should probably tighten their technology evaluation criteria’s and go find the nerds that have the most promising technologies available, not the ones who wear nicest suit purchased from professional tailor.
Re: Re: Re:9
Whatever market you were initially aiming for, be it kindergarteners or high school students, are for the most part not going to be on Techdirt. I highly doubt they’re the ones trolling you here. But we return to one of the original questions posed to you, why the fuck are you here instead of addressing the market, trolling other Techdirt users instead of promoting your software to your target demographic?
It’s almost like focusing on people whose only end goal is looking nice is a shitty business decision or something. Because even you know that it’s the case. And you’ve mentioned, multiple times, your own goal for Meshpage is to make it “look nice”. You admit to your scam so many times you actually believe it’s worth giving money for. You actually think your honesty is worth paying you. No wonder Paul Hansmeier is your personal hero.
Re: Re: Re:10
Well, my original idea for coming to techdirt was to help techdirt regulars in their copyright story. I gave them easy path from the copyright minimisation pattern to the maximalist dream, i.e. I allowed them to use the builder tool that I had created, and asked them to create mansions. So that instead of trolling copyright minimalist bullshit in techdirt, they could have some of their own products, and while doing that, my meshpage technology would gain those end users that were required to get investor money.
But as you know, techdirt didn’t see this plan as a success formula, i.e. they don’t think that creating copyrighted works is valuable activity, but instead they think that copying those works illegally is more profitable activity and thus they want copyright killed.
Re: Re: Re:10
yes. Meshpage has chosen this approach because 1) I have significant experience in the area
2) Its difficult task to pull off properly
3) I trust that I can pull it off
4) computers and software has significant problems in the area
5) I’m a software developer
6) It can actually help products who focus on useful aspects of the product to have generic tools that allow implementing “looking nice” requirement
Yes. so it will be useful to everyone who has useful but bad looking product available.
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Once again, you miss the point. I don’t make a lot of money from my music, and that I still make more money than you despite allowing people to share and remix my work legally means copyright has fuck-all to do with how successful one is.
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Asking for settlements is actually like 500 times more profitable than licensing the same material in the marketplace. Both the licensing activity and settlement activity require that you actually own the copyright.
Re: Re: Re:3
And the courts got sick and tired of being your money mule for that. So they’re slowly tightening the noose on you abusing that loophole.
Maybe if your copyright enforcers hadn’t been assholes when shilling for your hooker money, you might have gotten away with it longer.
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It’s not an abuse or a loophole. To qualify for settlement negotiation, you first need to:
1) create a product
2) sell the product to customers
3) get customers use the product
4) get pirates interested in the product
5) get pirates copy/distribute the product
6) build a system to track pirates
7) get access to court system
8) sue the pirates and convert ip addresses to pirate location
9) collect the settlement money from pirates.
Can you see that given that copyright owners needed to succeed in all these steps before settlement money is available to them. A little bit better compensation is needed at this point, than what you normally can collect from the marketplace, don’t you think?
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If you’re going to insult somebody else using a mom reference, you should know that the term to use is “your mom”. But the fact that your mother made more money than you did in ten years is not an insult on Samuel, either.
Except that no, archeology has already proved otherwise. Records indicate that the people who built the pyramids weren’t slaves, but free laborers who demanded full pay and benefits, and went on strike if their demands weren’t met.
There is a discussion worth making about how most large corporations essentially get by with underpaying their labor, but you chose to spend ten years on an engine nobody in any relevant industry uses, and that technology you developed is not worth the several million dollars you keep insisting the government of Finland owes you.
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Re: Re: Re:2
I expected this problem to fix itself once the quality of the product improves. Of course you can’t expect industry to change their established practices and jump into some completely unknown 3d engine for no good reasons. That’s why my engine gives them a good reason to do it: it saves time when the requirement is to get 3d model to their web page. And time is money, so my solution saves them money.
Re: Re: Re:3
Then why don’t they want to use it?
Re: Re: Re:4
The competition has been in the marketplace longer and has built strong following. So I lose in popularity.
Re: Re: Re:5
lol, too bad. Copyright law won’t save you there.
Or you could put your money where your mouth is for once and try to sue people for pirating Meshpage, even though those people don’t exist. Worst case scenario the Finnish judicial system laughs at you and bans you from filing more shitty cases, best case scenario you get thrown in prison for 14 years and wait out the rest of your natural lifespan.
Re: Re: Re:6
This level operation isn’t needed, since I have well executed plan for building copy protection to the web page. It’s called PHP. The php keeps the crown jewels hidden in a safe place that users are not able to access. This prevents pirates from copying the material and thus I simply don’t need to sue the bastards, since I have technological protection measures in place to prevent most of their piracy activity related to meshpage.
This would only be issue if my technological protection was insufficient to prevent the pirate community from accessing our proprietary technology.
I think the hackers who break through my web site protection will be first in line to become a jail bird.
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You bring up a good point: It sort of defeats the entire purpose of a “Three Strikes” plan, if you allow some content owner to inflict those same three strikes at the same time – or “before your victim can respond”.
…AND I would go so far as to say that YouTube’s Three Strikes is entirely the wrong sport!
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The “You crossed the neutral zone” plan with yardage penalties might actually be a good idea. With modern call review.
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Check this out, this is classic blunders of what people in usa are doing when they try to stretch legal statues to fit their particular activity:
https://torrentfreak.com/omi-in-a-hellcat-said-hed-kill-me-pirate-iptv-co-defendant-tells-court-230202/
The key information is this:
“”Carrasquillo expressed surprise that the “legal loophole” he’d exploited had somehow let him down.””
That sums up clearly what is happening in usa. Everyone expects that they can use loopholes and stretch the legal statues to their liking, but govt is actually fixing loopholes all the time, and courts do not consider activity that exploits the loopholes as legal.
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That explains why Prenda Law’s lawyers are both in jail, and Malibu Media ruined their own business pursuing copyright trolling.
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So why do you then insist that pirates should get free lunch from the backs of the authors?
Isn’t there similar kind of loophole in the activity that relies on fair use to mix&match hollywood movies to create indie videos, fast movies and gameplay videos?
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No such “free lunch” was ever insisted. What was insisted was the suggestion that when pursuing pirates, you provide strong evidence, do not harass the innocent, and stay within the boundaries of the law.
Both Prenda Law and Malibu Media failed on those counts, which is why judges noticed and asked for more evidence, because the judges suspected foul play. When the copyright lawyers failed and instead tried to have the judges removed, they were investigated and found guilty of breaking the law.
There’s no exception in copyright law that allows you to rape people to get rich the way you want it, Tero.
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Re: Re: Re:2
Happily it doesn’t need an exception to copyright law, only thing that is required is that the whole world follows copyright’s default behaviour, i.e. leave the operations like copying, performing, distributing the work to the authors.
No exceptions are needed for that, just follow the default behaviour is enough. Make sure your family, friends, and companies you work with will do the same.
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Re: Re: Re:2
It’s the pirates that are outside the law, not the people who procecute them.
It’s explicitly allowed to start legal proceedings without enough evidence, if you’re confident that discovery will reveal the pirate’s full operation. While you don’t beforehand know which apartment will have server farm that causes millions of damages to the copyright owners, you’re sure that the ip-addresses that the pirates are using are in the list.
Basically, copyright owners have arduous task of revealing illegal operations, and in that task, they wear the hat that ordinary police would be wearing if only they had resources left from procecuting more serious crimes. But when society puts responsibility to finding and highlighting the pirates to copyright owner’s responsibility, it wouldn’t be a surprise when some of them decide to use that permission.
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Unfortunately for you, fair use exists. Which you hate, you loathe, you detest with every fiber of your being.
Which you didn’t. And the RIAA didn’t.
So why is it every time the courts ask you for more evidence you run the fuck away? It’s because you’re not interested in finding out who’s guilty. You’re only looking for people you’re more likely to get a non-zero amount of money from.
You’re not even at a point where you can claim that. Judges have proven in multiple cases – the RIAA, Andrew Crossley, Evan Stone, Prenda Law, Strike 3, Malibu Media – that your supposed certainty of IP addresses is no more than pissing in the wind. Which is why you desperately have to pray that nobody asks to check your evidence. You’re literally scamming your way into favorable judgements. It’s no surprise why trust in copyright enforcement is at rock bottom, because you’ve proven time and time again that you’re not worth it.
Re: Re: Re:4
Well, the courts already required 2 months ago to put all your evidence to the table, and if they need more, that takes more time and money to gather. I’m sure the pirates don’t want to pay millions of lawyer’s fees simply because lawyers did some legwork to get the evidence. The pirates could just hand over the keys to their server room and it would be much simpler operation, but if they start hiding the evidence and fighting in courts paperwork, it will of course cost more when the plaintiff needs to use expensive lawyers to dig through the criminal enterprise.
Re: Re: Re:4
Yes, but USA has trust to police and any authority rock bottom too. I bet politicians and even the president gets just bullshit after fixing covid for you.
When copyright owners work with law enforcement to track pirates, they are using the badge of the police force. Since police resources are limited and they cannot track all infringements, the responsibility to track pirates have been moved to the copyright owners. It’s no wonder that copyright owners get trashed in the marketplace when they wear the police badge, when overall trust in authority is poor in usa.
lets seeeeee...
Time and effort for an Individual to spend THEIR time to Cut and edit, using Software Corps have to pay Lic. fee’s for.
Paying another company with MORE people, and an OWNER(sitting). To do a pro job.
Free vs $100,000+ per year?
The CFL has been making dumb decisions for a long time.
Toronto, the most populous city in Canada, has a CFL team BUT in Toronto, they black out all locally played games. So fans need to either go to the game or miss it. Needless to say, there are very few Toronto CFL fans in Toronto.
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Interesting news..
Some finnish hacker called Julius Kivimäki was arrested in france, after finland’s police had put him on most wanted criminals -list in europe.
Julius was on most wanted list because police has somehow linked him to hacking of vastaamo psykotherapy center and leaking all patient data to dark web/tor networks/bulletin boards for crims. Given patient data leaks are kinda serious GDPR matter with 10 million euros fines in EU, leaks of the patient data in this case is very serious matter too. There was over 22000 incident reports to the police recarding this issue and the hackers had misused the data/sent money extortion demands to the people whose information was present in the patient data.
But at least julius gets off from most wanted list since he had been arrested.
https://www.hs.fi/kotimaa/art-2000009369912.html
https://yle.fi/a/74-20016279
https://www.iltalehti.fi/digiuutiset/a/089913f2-4d6b-4053-a9e9-7d2610ebe639
Thanks for social bookmarking websites list. Really it gonna help many freshers to bookmark their websites/posts, etc. it has various advantages as mentioned above but most importantly it has the main advantage to bloggers, free social bookmarking websites will help them fetch traffic to their websites. When anyone submits any link to any famous bookmarking website, it gets tonnes of free attention and traffic.
https://www.bangzfamilysalon.com/