Last night I finished rendering the next TROM Series episode, 1h 16min long episode. Today I wanted to upload it to our TROM Series Youtube channel and surprise: I wasn’t logged in and my password was invalid. I was also unable to recover it. Nothing to say that my entire google account for TROM series (gmail: tromsite@gmail.com and everything associated with it) was shut down overnight. I had to ‘google it’ (the irony) and after reading a bunch of forums I realized that’s the case. I submitted a request for more info to a google page for disabled accounts and I’ve got an email (to my personal address) that indeed it was disabled.

Ok. So now I am not sure what lead to this, and this is the frustrating and scary part. Indeed on that account, there were several documentaries posted on google drive, and we had tons of copyright strikes on our youtube channel, some of whom we disputed. But to close all my account: gmail, picasa photos, youtube, google drive (for which I paid each month), and all google services like access to API’s…that’s a hard hit that will for sure force me to move away from google, at least not rely on it for anything because this can also happen to my personal account any time without warning.

Since documentaries from VideoNeat were connected (I think) to tromsite@gmail.com google drive then those are dead now. That’s almost half (if not more) of VideoNeat (plus images like posters and thumbnails). Google Drive, like all hosting entities out there for sure says “If you do not own a material do not upload here.” but how can you know if you are allowed to upload a documentary or a photo or stuff like that…As I knew all the documentaries I uploaded there were free for educational purposes, for which they were used. More than that what you might have seen on VideoNeat was a youtube-kind-of-version of those files, converted and streamed by google (not by me), not what I uploaded to their drive. More so, google removed a few such files (because weirdly it has bots scanning for copyrighted materials on your ‘personal’ drive that you bought) and deleted a handful of them and I was like “Oh, ok, didn’t know I wasn’t allowed to upload those, but good to know google automated system can detect and fix that like they do on youtube.”. So they had the power to delete any file that was ‘infringing’ their terms and services, and I was “Ok, whatever.” So why, if that was the reason to end all my account, didn’t they just delete all files that were “filthy” (copyright-wise)? Or at least send me an email “Tio, bro, be careful because we detected lots of copyrighted stuff on your drive.”. So I suspect that wasn’t teh reason at all.

Maybe it was the youtube channel where we uploaded stuff that had ‘copyrighted’ materials in them. TROM Series could not avoid getting away from that since we used fragments from documentaries in our videos, that were (again), for educational purposes and we successfully disputed these claims for our TROM Series and we won, at least that’s what I thought because youtube is like “You really want to dispute this? Becuase if you lose we will shut down all your account!”. And I disputed several such claims, never heard back from google, so maybe they decided later on that “Yeah, he didn’t win the dispute, so let’s remove his channel.”. TROM Series was also the channel where TROM Documentary was first uploaded and then butchered by copyright strikes. So maybe it was a really filthy channel….

Therefore, was it my gdrive and my collection of documentaries? Or my youtube channel where we posted original content? I will never know since that’s in google’s policy: they do not disclose the reason more than the email you saw above for which I had to do a request to get it. Basically google can shut down your account and give you no warning. That’s so Hitler-like that is hard to believe, but it is true.

 

What now?

First, acceptance. There is nothing I can do. To submit counter-notifications is synonymous to perhaps going to court for this or hire a lawyer. Not going there.

Second is to transform VideoNeat into something else where you can’t watch documentaries but you can only read about them. It sucks, but soon all videos will be gone. I will make a beautiful website where I recommend documentaries and I’ll provide the best sources of where you can watch them.

Third, reopening a TROM Series Youtube channel and NOT dispute any claim. If we have a video that might get us in troubles we will post a short video announcement about that and let people know where to watch it (on tromsite.com for sure). We have no choice.

Fourth, speaking of that, I will take all the stuff I made over the years (videos, books, etc.) and save them all to an offline hard drive + upload them in several online places to not rely only on Youtube or Vimeo. Tromsite.com is still the hub where TROM stuff will always have a home and not be raped by companies. This is why it is important to have a website because Youtube or Vimeo or others can get too bossy and fuck you up and you will realize everything you did will be gone overnight. I was aware of this before this is why the TROM Documentary and TROM Series were also uploaded to Vimeo. But now I will extend that to other places. I am also concerned because TROM Series is uploaded on my personal google drive as well, for those who want to download the episodes and do voice over for them. So I’ll have to do something about that too. In brief, I will have to completely divorce from any entity on the web: google, vimeo, etc.

I hope you understand that I’ll be somewhat busy the following days with this and won’t be able to work much on TROM. I will keep you posted here.

 

Update 1: I see the channel is still up https://www.youtube.com/user/TROMdocumentary/videos so this is likely a gdrive issue. I can’t access the channel. So it will live like a zombie channel there forever I suppose. Trying to contact google to see if at least we can recover the youtube channel, though I doubt.

Update 2: I can’t contact google apparently. The decision is quite final. The only way for me to fight with them would be the legal way – legal and meaningless words, lots of time, perhaps money, and who knows what. No way for me to do this. So goodbye forever to the above. Also, just to mention this: I or no one else made any money from VideoNeat or TROM Series. And videoenat was mainly used as a source of information (to cite claims) for TROM ebooks – like to prove a point or to source from where I got that info. It is not my fault that this world is fucked up and I can’t even source these documentaries because they are blanketed beneath rules, money, tribes, whatever. What are you people doing these ‘educational’ things for if you lock them up and keep them for yourself? And you are doing this in a world where to copy a documentary a billion times for a billion people costs nothing. Awful species. The shame of the universe.

Update 3: I created a kind of personal Twitter, a page where I can post updates and it updates live, no need to refresh. Here it is https://www.tiotrom.com/live/ – from now on I’ll use this all the time to post updates. I will try to ignore fb, twitter, and the like (the unsocial networks) from now on. I’ll rely on my own website at the expense of losing eyeballs. At least I keep my balls :D.

Update 4: I am working on rebuilding VideoNeat. This time though it will be unbreakable. Indeed you won’t be able to watch documentaries on the website directly, but I’ll say just don’t worry about that. You’ll see. It will be mobile friendly and I will also add some awesome special stuff like George Carlin’s specials, more lectures, and other stuff. Btw please support me if you can https://www.patreon.com/tio – I am nearly broke and I have to spend money on templates and plugins for the new VideoNeat. Thanks!

Update 5: VideoNeat is back! :).