Please stop the Tournaments,. They are growing out of hand. It would not surprise me of over $5,000 of merchandise had been put up for raffle in the FGC in the past month. This guy alone is raffling over $750 worth of stuff, and whoever wins it is likely to jut raffle everything off again. They are a bad look for the community. More importantly they’re almost certainly illegal, though raffle laws differ from state-to-state (to see if your raffle is legal in your state, ask a lawyer or consult this index of state raffle laws. hint: if you’re keeping the money, it probably isn’t legal).
In the state of California, the District Attorney is unlikely to pursue a case against illegal raffles unless they show commercial benefit, have conspicuous publicity or advertising, or there is a citizen’s complaint (seehttp://www.4c1lions.org/files/RaffleRules.pdf). In my mind, many of the raffles running today are both commercial and conspicious, as they’re advertised on twitter and twitch.tv week after week and the revenue is used to fund the sponsor rather than a charity. Even if you’re just one guy posting his first raffle, a simple complaint from someone may bring the office of the District Attorney down on your head.
All of us have broken the law at some point in our lives. Maybe you were speeding on your way to work this morning, or jay-walked last week, or got your older brother to buy you alcohol when you were 16. None of us are saints, but minor infractions typically ignored by authorities are always prosecuted when their magnitude grows large enough. One man jaywalking because he’s late for an appointment is not the same as a mob of 100 people blocking mid-day traffic. A few underage kids drinking in the basement is not the same as a kegger filled with high-school students. The raffle problem in the FGC is only getting bigger. Individually, none of these raffles looks that bad, but collectively they have the potential to attract a lot of attention. You are leaving a very bright digital trail of evidence in the form of tweets, facebook posts, and twitch.tv archives. I don’t want to read an article in Kotaku about someone charged with 48 counts of misdemeanor illegal raffles who pled out to a $10,000 fine and 1 year in jail. None of you are bad people or are trying to take advantage of the community, but you are breaking the law. I really don’t want anything bad to happen to anyone, so please stop.
So YouTube sent me a final warning saying that if I don’t take down by Drunken Master vids, they will delete my account.
What they don’t get is that the version I posted is the old, original dub of the movie, not the digitally remastered and re-dubbed version that Sony released in '02. Also, more importantly, my submission falls under the fair use clause in the 1978 Copyright Act, so it isn’t illegal.
I disputed on those grounds, but it seems YouTube doesn’t give a shit.
Out of the 30 seconds I spent reading this thread, I honestly feel like my time could have been better spent masturbating.
It’s just a copy and paste out of an already locked thread. I mean, if you spent even a LITTLE bit of effort making some kind of parody, say, maybe going after money matches or DLC or icecream or something, it would have a modicum of entertainment value, this is just old hat. Lazy, really.
I feel you about the YouTube shit, my account is close to being banned because I uploaded some old TV shows that had my grandfathers old RV sales commercials from the 70’s