**SPECIAL NOTE** This video deals a lot on "fair use" which is only a legal defense and not an actual law. Please consult with your lawyer before proceeding in situations like these and do not take our success in this matter as a sign it will work for you as well.
I think there are a few cameras that have been in development for so long that one must wonder if they are either "Abandoned" or just in need of a little bit of publicity to rekindle interest. For example whatever happened to the Apertus Axiom, AKA the first open source cinema camera that got all the way up to having prototype boards and an OS supposedly built by Magic Lantern? The last time I saw anything from anyone on one of these cameras we around the time of the BMPCC 4k. Likewise there is a newer open source camera that seemed really promising, more so than the Fran 8k, called the Ocotpus Camera offering something that looked a lot more like a modern RED, but whose case was shown off well before the Komodo ever existed? These seem like a potential prime sub genera of potentially abandoned cameras.
Fascinating video. Unfortunate that you had to go through all that. I've gotten a copyright strike warning before and it's very scary (we all know what that means for monetization on your channel). One question: in that counter notification stage, if he wanted to challenge you further he have to bring a lawsuit for copyright infringement, correct? RU-vid won't mediate.
Correct... claim, counterclaim, lawyers... And the idiot clearly knows he's wrong and would be instantly rolled under the first available bus for willful misuse of the copyright system. Because you don't like what I've said does not make it a copyright violation. (libel and/or defamation maybe, but not copyright.) People are quick to click that button because it's quick. (but it's also to knowingly submit a false claim)
I simply ask youtube each time if they're willing to go to court to bat for the illegally placed copyright strikes and they magically disappear. The "striker" is required by federal law to provide precise evidence of the claim or youtube supporting such a claim is a federal violation to begin with.
Wow, "Abandoned Camera" series has suddenly a lot of drama & suspense:) Who'd have thought it would come to this? Happy it turned out well for your initial video; please keep doing this! (Side note: I wonder if we should contact Steve Vai about that guitar opening solo in Fran's promotion video :D )
My personal history with Alejandro is only slightly less painful than yours or Bloom’s. I dealt with him first as a potential reseller and then at a competing company. Eventually he asked me for a job. I won’t get into personal details but I will say that the level of respect I feel in general to him matches my opinion of his embarrassingly bad videos, failed hack job product design and his outright contempt towards his own customer base.
Did he ever give you the VAT or business register ID of his company? That would be really useful in terms of finding more info on the bankruptcy, as that the only good identifier for looking up that type of information.
Honestly don’t recall. It’s been years and we considered him a joke more than anything. Every time one of his “product videos” would come out there were a couple of us who would hate watch and laugh in amazement at how awful they were. That’s pretty much what we thought of him.
@Lurch Trust me there is SO MUCH more below the surface here. It's all so pitiful I just don't want to dive back into it in my life. He was making products for years before this ridiculous camera and I dealt with him many, many times. It's all quite sad but I will say that it was never a "scam," just intensely wrongheaded and incompetent with a huge dose of ego thrown in.
@Lurch If you're not a psychiatrist, and you're well aware that a psychiatrist can't diagnose without an in person evaluation, why are you so eager to throw psychiatric diagnoses at him?
If that guy behind the Fran 8K is also claiming to be the guitarist, then he's probably also breaching Steve Vai's copyright, because that song is "For the Love of God". Look it up here on RU-vid to see Steve playing it with an orchestra.
Honestly, i find his story quite inspiring. Even someone totally incompetent managed to make it that far (like the graphic design on the site, the demo video for a cinema camera...), so surely if any of us has a dream, and we plan it out and work on it, we can succeed.
It's more to do with copyright laws. RU-vid could be held liable if they get involved in it so they just mediate the process. But they will removed users who abuse the copyright system. It's not the best but copyright laws have a long way to go to catch up with modern uses in the U.S.
@@FrameVoyager Unfortunately their choice of mediation is just... flawed. Especially because that "mediation" mostly seems to be "send everything to the claimant and ask if they think it's true, then take their response at face value"
Fran 8k just keeps on giving. The moment I saw this series, I asked in the comments would there be an episode about Fran. And suddenly, there was not one, but TWO. How wonderful :)
This is very much the Streisand effect in action. I am not part of the photography / videography community, but this particularly video was recommended to me. If Alejandro hadn't struck you for copyright, only the first video might have existed and I would have never known about it. As it is, it's a fascinating story, even for me as an outsider, and I'll be checking out your other videos. Great content!
I feel a little sorry for this guy, although he clearly has been in many ways his own worst enemy and if people lost deposits then in that respect, he is bang out of order. But he did deliver a 'camera' to Bloom, perhaps foolishly when it wasn't anywhere near ready. And it wasn't exactly 'vapourware' like Red's 28k sensor. Having lived and worked in Spain for many years and although I have a genuine fondness for the people, this kind of approach is sometimes common there, which at times made business difficult. In the formative years of digital cinema cameras, it's not necessarily hard to take an industrial sensor, a common OS and fabricate an enclosure to produce a camera. But the requirements of proper electronic development, usually FPGA based at this level are by no means easy and it takes years in the hands of both users and engineers to get it right. I think his dream was there but his interaction with his target market was a huge failing, if not a strangely eccentric one, and ultimately he just didn't have any seeming kind of capital behind him either.
While watching this video, I only had 1 lingering question: Did you send someone to shoot the Philip Bloom segment, or did he shoot the footage and provide it to you? (Yes, those are the kind of details my brain craves)
Unfortunately I think so. Someone else from Spain commented a while back on some message boards he's still up to the same bashing on customers or criticism.
For the Underdog story to work in your favor, you have to be likable, endearing, humble, and honest. Otherwise, you shouldn't try to do something that you want to be noticed by an audience, especially an audience as discerning as the film and photography enthusiast and professional communities. They did go above and beyond most and actually built a working prototype that looks like a complete package, sent it off to be reviewed. But if they can't take the criticism in order to improve on that prototype, then they are doomed to failure. It also looks like no one on the development team was a photographer or a filmmaker, so they didn't have the skills necessary to produce test footage with their camera, let alone build into it the tech necessary to compete with other offerings. Such an odd example all around.
I think they took notes from RED's PR strategy in the time of the RED One, which was very much based about selling the camera's shortcomings as "features": my favorite was the fact you couldn't realistically shoot incandescence with it - the reply from Jannard himself to the complaints was that the original Mysterium sensor was daylight-native, so you only had to use 5600K fixtures. "Natural vignetting" takes this approach to another level though - it's so silly, it's hilarious.
You can usually say whatever you like about a brand/product as long as what you say is factually true. If this damages their image, that's their problem. Unfortunately the youtube dispute system lacks any such nuance or basis in actual law, it's just a weak 'cover youtube's ass' system.
The entire copyright system is a joke. To obey the DMCA, YT has to take action on the mere accusation. If you've ever read through any of the process, you are _legally_ stating "to the best of your knowledge" a copyright violation has occurred, _AND_ you are the legal holder of that copyright. (as the owner of record, or their agent.) He knows full well there's no copyright claim to be had, but that's the quickest way to get the video down. (of course, the counterclaim process is just as fast.) (Of course, there are many MANY more problems with the entire mess within YT, but this is a case of a human intentionally misusing it. Not one of the many Google/YT AI bots.)
@@FrameVoyager Thanks for replying. By the way, I have always enjoyed your content. The quality is top notch. Seriously, I wish you guys get a network deal or something... The Abandoned Series is epic and I love your intros - who did your motion graphics and audio? Superb!
Thanks! And actually I did all of that in Premiere and Audition haha. Hoping to get some new editors this year though so we can really start pumping more content out every week
@@FrameVoyager No way! That's amazing. I LOVE the intro. It's so cinematic. I'm trying to start my own channel on CNC (and looking for a motion graphics guy for intro/outro), and I have an URSA Mini Pro and well, that's actually how I found your channel many months ago. Love your work man. I hope you continued success! :-D
@@CNC-Time-Lapse Thanks! Yeah, I'm super big into song selection. And that's awesome! I actually work a lot in the manufacturing space for my corporate clients. You go to IMTS at all?
I have the same problem with companies. I'm a bit too honest, so they won't send me stuff. That's why I decided to just buy it myself. That way I'm not beholden to any company. This guy seems nuts. Hopefully he'll just go away. That, or hopefully RU-vid will see that he is just causing trouble and ignore him in the future.
I sure hope so... The whole thing was crazy and he brought so much more exposure to this story. The original video doubled in views after he did this haha. But yeah, that's why I got away from doing reviews. I just like telling stories about how they are used or who built them. Then I can work with them but not just be making ads for them haha
The fact that anyone could just flag a video for copyright violation without providing any proof of copyright ownership is a major flaw on RU-vid's part.
If I had to guess it sounds like someone clueless about cinematography got a good deal with a factory in china willing to white label a camera for them using off the shelf components with poor optimization. They can’t afford to pay enginers to properly optimize things. I’m guessing they just wanted to make some money off of a cheap sensor and hardware someone else made but didn’t have enough margins to account for customer dissatisfaction/returns of a poorly optimized camera. They don’t realize how demanding a production environment is for a $30k camera. You can’t just slap together some components and add a mark up. That only works in cheap products people will throw away.
This reminds me of the halcyon days of the computer industry, a little over 30 years ago. You had all kinds of little companies popping up, trying to make peripherals for these new machines. Some would pop up selling true color frame buffers, or CPU expansion. There was a company showing a "Transputer". A card-set that they would claim could render your 3D images faster than anything. Some real companies, some real scams.
The Inmos Transputer processor was real and was designed to directly share data with four adjacent processors in a distributed array. Very innovative in its time, an early pioneer of high performance parallel processing. Here is an old marketing video: ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-cdK3PXKvYgs.html
@@knavekid You are absolutely correct. The Transputer was real. There were Transputer cards made for the Amiga, but never got any traction. What I was referring to was a company that had booths at some of the Amiga trade shows that claimed to have high-end 3D apps ported to the Amiga Transputer and was showing the app ray-tracing right there in the booth. It was noted that the hardware was never shown, and the rendering speeds, if indeed from a Transputer, weren't any faster than the native hardware.
Alejandro Martin comes across as utterly naive and misguided rather than a downright sinister scammer. That said, naive and misguided people can very well be both annoying and dangerous as well - even more so than scammers, since they might not be 100% aware of what they are doing.
What happens if a copyright holder abuses the system like this repeatedly. Are they just allowed to keep making claims, are are the eventually bared from making any claims? Does you tube make any effort to make sure the person filing the claim is, in fact, the copyright holder?
Is it possible for a single proprietor business to design, develop, and build a high-tech digital video camera without licensing software and hardware of more established companies?
DUDE this story is so engaging haha what a strange company. I can not get over the idea that the marketing for this camera was NOT a joke. It doesn't make any sense to me to believe anybody could 'seriously' market a cinema camera in that way hahaha
Wow. That was quite the rabbit-hole. I'd also be much more willing to root for the "little-guy" if he didn't come off like a wanker in his interactions with you and Phillip. If you can't be thick-skinned enough to take criticism from your user base, expect to have a very short shelf life in this industry.
I hate citing “fair use” when pertaining to journalism. Like in the traditional sense of what fair use is used to defend, reporting on a story doesn’t brooch copyright. Defamation? Sure. But copyright? No
I don't know why this video popped up on my recommended list, but it certainly was an interesting tale. I watched it instead of the big game half-time show.
It really was an interesting circumstance and it made for great content. Thanks for watching though. I have found a lot of people who are not necessarily in the video world end up liking our content.
Wow this escalated fast. It just seems that he just can't take any kind of criticism about his products, constructive or otherwise and just wants people to be be biased towards his products, or else don't say anything at all. It looks like he doesn't he realise that in order for a product to do well, it needs to be tested by people who are going to be unbiased and give constructive criticism in order to improve it and get it to work in the way people want it to. It was not like people, including yourself in your Fran 8K video, were purposely out to attack him or his company. Whatever the case, it will be interesting to see if this goes any further.
I'm like Philip Bloom! I want him to succeed, I want all of these cameras to succeed. But you can't do that by trashing respected people in the industry
That entire Cinemartin company seems pretty scammy. The attitude towards reviews, and criticism should tell you everything about the company you need to know.
any company that claims that there is 0 possibility that they may have sent out a faulty product are a bunch of fools, its simply a statistical impossibility
MM for their threat, I wish there was a way to without getting in trouble respond to that with "fuck off and get a lawyer" cause nah those threats just make me want to tell you where to take your copyright
How can a copy right exist on a product that does not exist? No company, no patent, no copy rights! If there is no patent their is no copy right. To break a rule there must be a rule to break!
@@FrameVoyager The strange thing is or should I say the real question, is does he own a patent at all? You can close a company and or go bankrupt and the patents can continue, via being sold or if the company is now no longer using the same name those patents can be transferred. But none of this happens automatically. Trust me i know, I was part of a company that went bankrupt and our patents were transferred to the company that purchased our name and patents.. through the bankruptcy court. If you know the state the company was set up in you should be able to find what court handled the bankruptcy filings and all the docs that are connected to that company. In fact if no one transferred them, you may be able to actually take them as your own... I'm serious... If there is no holder of a patent that patent no longer exist!
Fair use is a doctrine in United States law that permits limited use of copyrighted material without having to first acquire permission from the copyright holder.
All companies with sales need to have extra product to sell if one of their units is faulty and need a budget to pay for shipping when THEIR products is faulty
abusing copyright law is a federal crime. call his bluff take him to court. if he tries to turn it into libel you can put a motion to charge him for abusing copyright law.
@@FrameVoyager I just don't understand how someone can be so egotistical and narcissistic that they would risk jail time to protect a dead product and flog a brand that basically doesn't exist anymore. that's just no way to live life. maybe its like a sad alcoholic uncle who wont shut up about the time he won the big football game and parades his trophy but when people point out he was benched that game because of a torn ACL he gets violent. I've seen similar crap going down in the crypto/meta-kickstarter/NFT/web 3.0 space now that everyone is seeing its a scam and that it was a terrible idea to begin with. honestly I can't wait until youtube gets hit with a class action lawsuit over copyright trolls. that ishowspeed guy debacle might just do it too. dude made millions stealing revenue from anyone who mentioned his name and people folding. as well as him publicly doxxing people who didn't submit to his will abusing the copyright system to get their info. I get that youtube is bound by an archaic system but with the mass exodus of users cutting into profits and the ever present danger of bad actors doxxing people and possibly getting users killed you'd think the heads of youtube would take a larger interest in changing that archaic system.
That's him playing guitar?? So that's him covering Steve Vai 'For the Love of God' because that's a very well known commercial song any guitar enthusiast should know..
Thanks for the interesting video. While I very much share your view we always want to see the next Z-Cam or Kinefinity emerge, with respect to Cinemartin I'd rather see them fade away over the horizon. There are to me so many red flags surrounding the incorporation, operation and alleged bankruptcy of this company, that I am afraid any future business ventures may do more harm than good to our cameraphile community. I will certainly not be a customer.
Spain has a small problem with people not wanting to pay Tax, the government is getting more tight on it now but it's still a thing. I always think of the drone videos showing all the people with swimming pools who dont declare them.
I am making this comment because youtube keeps showing me an ad that I wish not to see, the “Are you gay?” ad. I don’t care if someone is gay, that is their business. And whether I am or am not gay is my business. And I would like it to stay that way, but I am tired of RU-vid constantly stuffing it in my face. So I will not watch this video on youtube because they are, once again, showing me an ad I wish not to see. I will look for your video on Facebook and view it there. If there is another place you post your videos, let me know so I can view your amazing content without having this add shoved in my face ALL the time. My hope is that others will use this same comment for ads they wish not to see and that you will tell youtube about this comment. Thank you for your great content that will now go unseen by me on youtube, sorry.
Google (and therefore RU-vid) bases its ads on what it sees as your interests, which it deduces from your browsing history. By watching what you browse, Google (and therefore RU-vid) knows you want to see that advert.
RU-vidr Jill Bearup started using an alternative open video service a few weeks ago. I think it's time to start moving away from RU-vid. I'd say the name of the service but they delete the post instantly.
@Frame Voyager she is doing both. If it's demonetized on RU-vid, then you get nothing there anyway. Frankly, I think youtube is headed in a bad direction. Heavy censorship and they've decided they want to be cable TV.
"Either way, we knew our video had every right to exist." But even with the take-down of it from here, if you didn't delete it from your own storage, then it still DOES exist.
This is indeed a weird situation. However, it is extremely difficult to come up with a new product because you need somebody to do a thorough patent search to see what things have already been patented and might have to be licensed and what approaches you might have to take to avoid patent infringement. This leads to a situation where you have to do a lot of things that haven’t been done before and, chances are, you will make mistakes. You’re simply going to have to rework some things and do some things over and accept returns from customers because some things don’t work out. I think the problem may simply have been that they wasn’t enough money to give this project a good start.
Sounds familiar!!!. There are individuals with certain *mental health conditions* or under medication (with all due respect), who will put their own money on their ideas and products. You can easily see missing details on the websites or documentation (usually created by them) or just entirely failing to deliver quality results; it gets clearer when you notice how meticulous they are around the opinions, reviews, criticism, rejection, and failures in communication. It can sound weird or funny, but it could be difficult and sad to watch. Not everything is a scam, mental health issues are real.
Totally agree. Along with the language barrier too I could have gone a lot farther on this content. But at the end of the day my intent was to at least warn people in the industry about him if he ever tries to come back into it. But you make a very fair point and we never thought it was a scam either! The details just don't fit that
