they seem to be doing a tag search, and complaining about all videos with specific tags that appar tetris related en masse that are cloning their game. it's only a matter of time before they hit on the one that brings up all the texmaster videos, and then i suspect they will all get pulled too. TGM1 is mamed and zinced, and they don't seem to care about that. however i'm suprised they have left up TAP performances that are from mame. ones from real hardware are fine of course. They arent' targetting us. they are targetting the clones of their games.
My thoughts, which have been said on #arika already (lol registered trademark channel name): Heboris has been around for a while. There's no way that Arika can have only just realised it exists, or that it is a popular clone of the TGM series. However, Heboris netplay has recently been released, and I believe this is the spark for the removals. The netplay is something important that Heboris has that TGM games do not. Until its release, Heboris was merely a clone. Something that was merely an inferior imitation to the TGM games. Never a proper substitute for the real thing. Yet with netplay that graphic is removed. Heboris is now, in a way, better than the TGM games are. It's now a proper threat to the series and to Arika, which is why I think they're cracking down on this. I doubt that Texmaster videos will be touched, because they're simply clone videos again. They're not removing attention from TGM to a better game. I think the only Texmaster videos removed are ones that have Heboris in the tags or description. So far none of my TGM videos have been removed. Surely if they were trying to eradicate such things, they'd be the first to go? I mean, they are the only ones that are a direct infringement of copyright, being on an emulator. As a final point, I note that Zemus's TGM3 GM video has not been removed. This is nothing but a video on Arika's site being uploaded on YouTube. It has a massive amount of hits, and is one of the first search results for 'Tetris'. In my opinion, the reason it remains is simply the fact it has "ARIKA" in the bottom right hand corner. It's attracting attention to Arika and TGM, rather than away to games like Heboris, which could draw away potential new fans of the series, and also remove current ones.
From what I've seen of Japanese companies, they generally seem to view videos with their own products as free advertisements, which might explain why videos of the official games haven't been touched. They tend to only complain if it's likely to directly affect sales. (In one case, I noticed full episodes of a TV anime series were generally left alone for over a year. Then the company released it on DVD and quickly took down virtually every video of it on YouTube.) In this case, Heboris is likely to attract attention away from TGM, thus giving Arika motivation to complain. Though what I find odd is that Arika's only starting now, when Heboris was taken down last summer, and the message Hoshiken left in place of the official Heboris2001 download page seemed to imply that he took it down because Arika complained and he didn't want to make a big fuss.
I dont' think Arika complained. As i understand it, the author saw what was going on with U.E., and withdrew the game before arika complained. Other were turning it from something merely INSPIRED by TAP to a very blatant clone, and that bothered the guy.
i don't know how many here are familiar with american politics but reverend wright has something to say on the matter: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YrhrEx_NKJM
they also removed my TAP death speed training starting at lv900 (obviously made with mame) so i believe they're not only searching for the tags but they're actually looking at the videos.
They removed my Heboris video. Wasn't a big deal at first, because I was using official sounds and music. Now, a couple days later, they remove all four of my Texmaster videos. So...uh...fucking hell.
They just took 4 more of mine (Texmaster) today, now only one is left. You know, at this point, I'm really tempted to reupload one of them, or even better, upload a video of my own game, and see how they react to that, eh?
They've filed complaints on almost all Texmaster videos. I was fortunate to have made all of mine private yesterday. I just had a bad feeling when they had removed 6 of my Heboris runs. Sorry for everyone who lost their videos.
Did I not call it? Videos from original hardware=okay. VIdeos from MAME/Clones=bad. Videos from TGM only=okay, because TGM is allowed to be MAMEd.
How, when it says that Arika were the people who complained? Also, Heboris has been like this for ages. They requested we removed the videos which directly copied the sounds from TAP, but they seemed to have no problem with others. Also, they requested they be removed. They didn't go straight to YouTube to get them taken down. And it wouldn't explain the removal of Texmaster videos.
I'm making a protest video. What I need are 5-second AVI clips of Tetris clones. Good ones, not miniclip/n-blox.
