Received this today:

The Gooseberry crowd-funding campaign is over!

Unfortunately we didn't get enough funding in to make a feature length movie. We do have a lot of support though - over 4500 people donated or subscribed. That's more than enough to start working on the Pilot of the film.

You can read a lot more about it here: http://gooseberry.blender.org/campaign-wrap-up-the-pilot/

In a later email you will be contacted about refunds, cancellations, or activations of pledges. We won't do anything without your explicit approval. Just give us a bit of time to handle it well.

Please read the following carefully, one of the cases applies yours.

1) PayPal and Bank pledges If you paid us already you will be contacted today or tomorrow. You then can decide whether you prefer a refund or if want to support the film project after all.

2) Credit card pledges If you have pledged using a Credit Card, no charges have happened yet. We will contact you early next week with an option to cancel the pledge, or to activate it. We will not charge any card without your permission.

3) Cloud pledges If you promised to join Blender Cloud if we made our target, you will get contacted next week too.

4) Active Cloud Subscriptions If you already joined Blender Cloud, you will get contacted next week with our plans for further development of Blender Cloud, and how the Pilot project will fit in. We hope you stay on board, but a subscription can be cancelled any time.

You can contact us any time with questions. We do our best to handle emails within a day!

Thanks,

The Blender Cloud team: - Ton Roosendaal - Francesco Siddi

Related articles

• Gooseberry Targets not met, new Plan Announced
• Campaign wrap up - the Pilot
• The Gooseberry Project: Blender Institute first crowd-funded, feature-length open movie

It looks like the message came through – as of 9am this morning (CET), Sintel is available on YouTube again. In case you missed it, there was an outcry on the internet this weekend as it was pulled by Sony after alleged copyright infringement.

To put things into perspective, these YouTube takedowns are massively automated. Software scans all the uploaded media and flags any material where they detect copyrighted material. Large corporations such as Sony have enough traction with YouTube that they can then also automatically take down these media (smaller companies have to manually submit a DMCA takedown notice).

So is there still a problem? You bet there is – we’re lucky to have a huge and vocal community behind us, that spread this story over the web in a couple of hours. The story was featured on Cartoon Brew, Boing Boing, Slashdot and Reddit (which nuked the BlenderNation server for a few hours). This helped revert the takedown. If you’re a small publisher however, you will find it nearly impossible to talk to anyone and get your video back up. These automated takedowns can destroy your project and leave you powerless.

Boing Boing hits the nail on the head with their comment:

While it’s probably a mistake, because this is so brain-meltingly obviously wrong, it’s also a very stark example of how sloppy, over-broad, and consequence-free enforcement of copyright can damage culture.

I don’t think there was any intent behind this particular takedown – just an unfair, unaccountable system. I’m glad we got Sintel back.

Sintel Restored on YouTube Editorial | BlenderNation.