Sony Wants YouTube To Take Down Popular Crowdfunded Film “Sintel”

Michael Lee,

sintel image header

When a big and powerful movie studio as large as Sony Pictures sees their copyrighted material being used without their consent they will rightfully ask whatever video hosting website to take it down. But when they don’t own anything or their is no obvious copyright infringement it creates some what of a problem.

This is the kind of problem that Blender is going is going through right now with their crowdfunded indie film Sintel. Sony Pictures wants YouTube to remove the film from its website. And even though this isn’t the first time the studio has made the request, the video keeps being taken down, only to resurface, but suffers the wrath of the studio’s legal team again. Hit the jump to learn more.

Here is how CartoonBrew describes the situation:

Sintel, a film by Colin Levy which has been featured before on Cartoon Brew, was created by the Blender Foundation, the non-profit organization which promotes the free, open source 3D software Blender.

Their goal is giving the Internet community access to its 3D technology.

Sintel, which was developed back in 2010, was created by a group of artists, and was funded by donations, DVD sales and other sponsorship. All of the film’s materials, characters, animation, textures, and more fall were created by the artists who used the Blender technology. Therefore their work would fall under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0. This would allow for the content to be shared freely.

The removal of the film is most likely the result of a faulty DMCA take-down request, but it speaks to a bigger and more troubling issue: corporations today have unprecedented control to wipe independent creators off the Internet.

CartoonBrew later updated the report with a tweet from MediaGoblin

Many sites are saying that Sony should be ashamed of themselves for filing such a claim, even when they don’t own the property itself. Some are pointing their anger at YouTube for even acknowledging Sony’s false DMCA claim. It’s unclear how Blender will react, if they react at all seeing that they are a non-profit group. But nobody would blame them if they did file a lawsuit against Sony Pictures for filing a false DMCA claim.

Sintel (2009) – Full Film from Colin Levy on Vimeo.

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