Kickstarter Movie Hits Us With Copyright Violation

You know what is ironic? KickStarter is supposed to be a source to connect and virally fund your projects and it would seem that exposure to horror blogs for free is something they would want.

So when your trailer that you have released gets posted on our site that is a good thing… right?

I thought long and hard on whether or not we should even talk about what happened with the filmmaker funding his project on KickStarter and after many many back and forths on ‘Yes we will write about it’ or ‘no it will make us look like jerks’ I have decided to write about it.

A little while back when we were compiling awesome trailers for 2013 we stumbled on a pretty wild indie movie that we had no idea was even a kickstarter project. We discovered the trailer on Youtube while doing a snoop around for cool shorts and other fun things to share with our friends and you the reader .

The trailer in question was awesome so we added it to our Youtube PlayList for 2013 horror movies for coverage on our site. Why did we put the trailer on our playlist? So we can easily use it on our site and of course have a complete playlist of cool horror movies you can look forward to in 2013.

I thought it was fair use given that our intent was to expose it to our large community. Does the filmmaker have the right to ask us to stop using it? Absolutely. Have we ever refused? Absolutely NOT.

Getting to the point of the story a week ago I woke up to a copyright notice for Violating the copyright of *** ***********. I was shocked since we would never deliberately post a trailer for a movie that we thought was not fair use. Our goal is to support horror movies and most importantly indie filmmakers.

So my first thought was who is this guy, I am gonna google him which led me to find out its a Kickstarter Project and he is the filmmaker and my head exploded at the irony. Your trailer starts to go viral and show up on blogs and you start hitting them ( or maybe just us ) with copyright violation notices.

My assumption is he was pissed that his trailer was on Youtube when he only wants it on Kickstarter and for that I am sorry because I had no idea in promoting his movie we would anger him so much he would hit us with a copyright strike. Frankly we had no idea it was even a Kickstarter Project.

I am asking you readers, filmmakers and fellow bloggers is this a good move or a bad move?

From my perspective its a ridiculous move. If you are funding a movie on Kickstarter and attack a blog with a copyright strike you are attacking the very source of your funding. Not to mention if we are able to connect and build a relationship you now have a free source of PR to reach thousands of people a day who are here for no reason other then to read about your movie and others.

We regularly promote Kickstarter projects and this wont stop us but I have to ask myself what logic told a filmmaker to attack us with copyright violation for a trailer post?

Our site is a small fish in a big sea and we don’t pretend this is TIME Magazine or act overly self important. That said when you negatively touch us you also potentially are negatively exposed to our readers, our Facebook Community, our Twitter Clan and our Google+ group.

Is a copyright strike worth that kind of negative exposure? Is all press good press even bad press?

The message here is if you are making a movie its probably not the best idea to slam your fans with a copyright notice for posting your trailer. If you dont want your trailer up why not send an email? Major studios can get away with Copyright Notices because candidly they spend hundreds of millions on marketing campaigns and think they dont need us. You indie filmmakers CLEARLY need bloggers. Period, Case Closed!

Every blogger will respond faster and much nicer to a quick ‘hey can you address this issue for us’.

Case and point over the weekend somebody posted some really outrageous comments about a filmmaker on our site and the filmmaker emailed, thanked us for our support and ASKED if we could remove the salacious comment. No threats, no lawyers, just a simple email.

By now some are asking who is the filmmaker and what is his movie so we can spread it around and to that I will say, I wont tell. I do not feel it shows character on my part to name the film or the filmmaker that attacked me. By doing this we negatively hurt all the people who put their heart and soul into making the movie over one decision by what I suspect is one person who thinks they know how to market a movie.

I do feel by posting this blog it might make others at least think for a second before they attack a site that is not posting negatively about them but simply trying to help build buzz for their movie.

Hopefully you all agree we took the high road in not naming the filmmaker and don’t think less of us for venting. Keeping it bottled up was going to drive me to drinking or make my head explode. So I chose to blog it. Hopefully you understand we are posting this to vent a common issue that we as horror bloggers face and it needs to stop. Its the first time an indie filmmaker much less a KickStarter project slammed us but its not the first time we have seen this happen. Its a regular occurrence.

A stat worth thinking about if you are a filmmaker according to 2013 Technorati Digital Influence Report via ReadWrite blogs Influence 31% of consumers. Facebook influences 30%, Pinterest only 12%, Twitter 8%, news sites 7%.

Read that line again if your an indie horror filmmaker and then think long and hard about who is driving your DVD / VOD sales and your online buzz. Then please take that copyright notice and throw it in the trash and instead send a nice email to the blogs that are promoting you and ask them to remove content if you dont want it up. Dont bully us.

If you support horror bloggers and think that we deserve more respect and better treatment on issues like this you can show us by sharing this on Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, etc. Comments are welcome share your thoughts below.

Update: From the comments below Art made an excellent comment which I want to respond to . He points out that there is no value to us posting a trailer and not linking to the kickstarter. I do not agree but worth noting we do news, with Youtube Trailers and then AFTER usually at weeks end our Video Editor will add them to our Youtube Channel in the appropriate section. We do not add every video just the ones that strike us as cool.