So this Maj kid is like, 11, right? I mean, who else would be crying over youtube videos…
I think you misunderstood my post. I have nothing against the guy. I remember a long time ago, i’m talking 8 years, I started a thread asking what footsies are, and everyone flamed me except him, he wrote a long response to my question. I’m sure he’s a great guy.
lots of people have similar websites to Maj. Some are really good some aren’t. It’s not like you can copyright the rights to making combo videos. Also, how many times are you going to write an article like the footsie handbook?
Things like the footsie handbook were admitadly written for beginers. I don’t think anybody is deneying that. In my opinion, godsgarden is the highest level tournament. So yeah, I do think the GG matches are higher level than his website. I’m not trying to insult anybody here, i’m just calling things how i see them.
The bottom line is that its about cooperation, and EH ignores requests to change sourcing or even pull content because he pretty much knows exactly what he is doing. Its unfortunate but this is pretty obvious theft. That’s why the site is so clean guys. Because he doesn’t have much original content on the front page and hotlinks other sites’ work directly without having to click through the original site. SRK, SH, IPW, etc don’t make anything off of youtube. They make their money off their sites, and when someone is directly pulling their content (created exclusively for those sites) without giving any type of direct link to the article of the original content they’re having that money pulled from their pockets. It’s just plain unethical and dirty.
Lets say you make a site about stick art. You’re selling that art online and have some demo shots of what it’ll look like on a completed project.
Now lets say another guy makes a website about stick mods. He takes your pictures of your work that you’re selling online and sells that art as his own without giving you any credit. That’s what’s going on here. Maj put HOURS into these combo videos. Bitch about the quality or whatever but that’s HIS WORK. He should be given credit and the traffic to give him something for giving us his art.
Um… Chindogg, did you actually mouse over all of those links? Yes, most of them go to youtube, but 4 of the links go to the following sources: IPW, Crosscounter.tv, Shoryuken, Maj’s Combovid.com
I’m guessing he linked to the original source (i.e. shoryuken.com), then opened their youtube channel to find any related vids in addition to the source’s post. That seems to be fair enough.
Sabin is right when he says that EH is filling a void that other sites aren’t in terms of centralizing content… but, and this was pointed out, the issue is how they’re going about doing that. While there may be a whole other side to this for folks who do profit from that, it’s not the “good” anyone is focusing on here because the good doesn’t redeem the bad. It’s not their content, the way they half-ass their trackbacks and links basically implies that they are the one stop shop for this stuff and the community needs to realize that that isn’t the case. Wanting to get your news from one location isn’t bad, but it’s extremely fucking lazy not to look at how those guys source things and just view them as the content creators. Hell, making money off people like that is actually pretty smart, but I think folks can do better than that, personally.
EH might be a one stop for some players, but their influence extends beyond that and the reality is also that they are taking content from others with no payback. It’s theft and the community, which would hopefully recognize that since that’s what this content is generally produced for, doesn’t quite get what’s going on. I know plenty of folks in my player circle who read or link to EventHubs because it’s easy, but they have no real connection to the material that’s being linked to. These guys are free to manipulate and alter information as they see fit and they become the eyes, ears, and brains for a lot of the community. That’s not how things should be, while it’s good business it’s obviously ethically corrupt and these guys shouldn’t get away with conduct like that. Not if we can see this for what it clearly is.
In terms of how I think SRK can do a better job. I remember when we had community spotlights where we would see local players or showcase local scenes where you could play offline. This entire push for online isn’t exactly this great thing when we still have players who don’t show up to local events because they don’t know about SRK’s matchmaking forum or the local scene that is merely half an hour away from their house. I talked to some dude watching the Xanadu stream and I knew more about the Pacfic Northwest Matchmaking forum than he did. This potential new player lives near 707, come on! There are plenty of people who merely need a point in the right direction and that just isn’t being done. I claim EC, so how does that happen when we have this new age of fighting games?
SRK needs to tap into that resource, it’s something that no one is doing yet. A lot of players are focused on the celebrity of this new age of fighting games, famous places, famous players… if there’s anything that needs to be done it’s show that ANYONE can come up in the right environment of local player provided they know where to look. I feel that’s been lost for all the streams and special events. We need to reinforce that everyone is still competing. So if you want a void that EH isn’t filling (but could, cause, hey, free forum post guys), here we are. Maj’s predicament notwithstanding, there’s my view on what SRK could be doing better as a newssite.
When youtube is being used as a storage medium for the website’s videos, that’s when its wrong. Maj’s videos are content for HIS WEBSITE. When someone pulls that content off of his youtube and doesn’t site the source where HIS CONTENT for HIS WEBSITE is supposed to come from, that’s flat out stealing.
Youtube isn’t paying Maj for his work, his site is. And the fact that EH is getting more views from HIS WORK that’s supposed to be on HIS SITE is plenty reason for him to get pissed. Read just about every post I’ve made. This isn’t about copying content, its about stealing content made for the authors’ specific sites. Look at that article that I posted where I was banned from EH. Look at the comments. People bitching about Keits saying SRK every couple of lines.
THATS BECAUSE HE MADE THE VIDEO FOR SRK AND DIDN’T WANT EVENTHUBS TO TAKE IT WITHOUT SOURCING HIM.
And yet they still took it, without sourcing initially. It took me getting banned and someone else to complain to finally have the video sourced (and not even to the article that posted it on the frontpage.)
@Chin
Again I bring up the Facebook clause. If I link his vids to my facebook, am I going to be flamed for the same reason? Does it even matter? It’s not the vid itself that gets the revenue, its the site. If he wanted to gain money off of his vids, he’d better advertise his site so that most people would WANT to go there to see his vids. Or, he could have simply told Catalyst about it and asked Cat to link people to his site rather than just the youtube vids, work something out.
Instead, he chose to explode over it, which doesn’t help him in any way. Keits could do the same thing. But no, most I see done is just flaming the site.
Have people negotiate instead of just sitting around butthurt to get things done. If not, the same general thing will keep happening, people will still go to EH, and the world will keep on turning.
If you link something on facebook you’re not making money off the hits on your facebook page. Don’t be an idiot.
Are you making thousands of dollars by posting those videos on your Facebook? Have you repeatedly done so with so many other people’s work in the past? Are you still doing it?
This guy posts other people’s work and makes thousands on it from popup ad revenue. Meanwhile the original creators are making nothing. How fair is that. Now Maj is done. At least that’s a source he can’t steal from anymore.
If everyone followed Maj’s decision EH would only have Kotaku and Capcom-Unity links on their front page and that site would die.
No one is saying that what EH does is illegal or anything even close. No one cares if an individual links something without sourcing to their friends, et cetera.
However, to do this consistently, as a pattern, is anathema to a community.
As an aside, Maj hardly exploded. I thought the whole letter was much more sad than anything, as his writings (more than his videos, even) are really useful to the community as a whole.
I’m just gunna quote myself here, since the rest of my post seems to be ignored.
"It’s not the vid itself that gets the revenue, its the site. If he wanted to gain money off of his vids, he’d better advertise his site so that most people would WANT to go there to see his vids. Or, he could have simply told Catalyst about it and asked Cat to link people to his site rather than just the youtube vids, work something out.
Have people negotiate instead of just sitting around butthurt to get things done. If not, the same general thing will keep happening, people will still go to EH, and the world will keep on turning."
If he had a problem, a problem that seems to have been ongoing, he could have, at any time, contacted the EH admin about it. But he did not, and is upset at the subsequent cash he doesn’t have. Sides that, you would think that people go to EH just for his vids. The hits aren’t coming from just that, but from the site as a whole, for whatever reason.
A lot of people do have similar websites to Maj but I am not exaggerating when I say that none of them talk about things on the level and with the amount of depth that he does. The footsies handbook is one of a kind. No other person has ever broken down footsies to the level he has in that handbook, forget about also finding high level examples of each situation from real matches between top players.
Nobody has to write the footsies handbook again now that Maj has created it, but that doesn’t mean that it loses value. That handbook isn’t SF4 specific, it applies to every worthwhile 2d fighting game ever, in the past, and in the future.
The footsies handbook is written at a level accessible to beginners, but the knowledge within is absolutely not beginner whatsoever. Many players who routinely place well in tournaments could stand to improve their game a great deal by reading the handbook and applying it to their play.
You can’t directly compare GodsGarden tournament footage to Maj’s handbook, they are apples and oranges. What you CAN compare is the level of knowledge you can learn from reading the handbook vs watching a GodsGarden match. The vast, vast majority of SF players do not watch videos the right way, often because they do not have a good enough understanding of SF to be able to watch those videos the right way. They look at combos and setups, but don’t break them down into strategic decisions and choices.
Paraphrasing what someone else wrote recently, Street Fighter starts out as a game of manual dexterity and reflexes - if you can do moves better than your friends and react better, you will win. Then it becomes a game of knowledge, where if you know the matchup better and know what to do in the right situations, you will win. Finally, it becomes a game of strategy, where you play your opponent, not your opponent’s character.
Maj’s footsies handbook not only describes what to do in situations, it provides you with a massive amount of STRATEGIC information. It’s not just specific tricks and tactics, it’s about incorporating spacing and baits into your overall game. Would Ricky Ortiz get more out of watching GodsGarden than reading Maj’s site? Sure. The vast majority of players do not, since when they watch a tournament stream, all they see is combos and guesses, not strategic choices.
I would love to see Maj write on a high level about many other aspects of advanced SF play that most people don’t understand as well as they think. I hope someday he really does sit down and write a series of articles about the mid-range fireball game, that would be amazing.
Like I said in a previous post, he should just put a banner ad to his website (or a longer splash screen) on his youtube videos. Saying its wrong to link to someone else’s youtube video is a stretch. Other websites do that all the time, including srk. Now if it were a matter of somebody ripping the flv file, and then reuploading the file as their own, then yes that is absolutely wrong. But it doesn’t sound like eventhubs does this. I could be wrong, I don’t play fighting games anymore so I’ve never even visited or heard of eventhubs until today.
If its a matter of copy and pasting an entire guide, and changing the author name to your own, that too is wrong, but it sounds like eventhubs credits the source, albeit with some exceptions (but nobody is perfect in this regard, including SRK).
Besides, there is a gray area to guides in general. Lets say in Starcraft you come up with a great build order and post about it, what’s to stop other people from discovering the same build themselves and posting a similar guide? You can’t really claim ownership of a certain tactic or strategy. Its one thing to say someone copy and pasted your work, its another to argue that you are the inventor of x,y,z where x,y,z is a combo, frame data, strategy, and that you have all rights to this data.
IP in general is a gray area. Blizzard and KESPA fought because KESPA made money off of pro starcraft tournaments. Blizzard argued that the game is their IP. Based on this, you can argue that all sf4 combo/tournament videos are violating Capcom’s IP. I’m no expert, so some lawyer who studies IP law, please feel free to comment on this one… I do know that some game companies have had problems with the machinima community for this very same reason.
Bottom line, copyright laws exist to make sure the creators of content get credit/recognition/money. Lots of sites, including youtube, are moving toward a revenue sharing model (for example, if you make a youtube video and use copyrighted music, you split the ad revenue with the music creator). Hopefully Maj can find some revenue sharing solution that will be beneficial for him.
Exactly. EH has been posting Maj’s videos for almost 2 years now (SF4 bi-weekly TACV, etc.), yet Maj never contacts them (probably because he thought it might be good publicity for his site). And it probably was good publicity. I’m sure a lot of EH users would have never heard of him if not for the SonicHurricane logo at the beginning of his TACV’s.
But things didn’t pan out financially as Maj had hoped, so now he’s all up in arms about the stealing of his content. I don’t think it’s really fair to blame EH for that.
Not to try and draw something out here, but I have to wonder how a website like event hubs got so popular? Could it be that other sites weren’t organizing their info as well? Seems like a lot of the reasons that I’ve seen here suggest that people go to Eventhubs because it’s convienent. Does that sound about right?
Isn’t Eventhubs advertised in a lot of Capcom promotional material, or am I thinking of just Capcom-Unity?
that’s fucked up
Yes that’s pretty much it. Srk dropped the ball on this for years now and now niggas is on blast.
Edit also probably good search optimization etc. It’s a combination of a bunch of things.
Now keits posts the same news articles as eventhubs and eh ends up getting more hits for the same news article. It’s getting better but it’s still a blowup.
I wish catalyst would post about the situation.
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I just watched that ode to two-hit combo on his site and that shit was fire. Good work.