1/12/2021 edit: So - in December I came across a demo somebody made on Youtube of a Japanese synthesizer. At the end of the video they do a brief little jam with it which inspired me. I kept wanting to hear it expanded and I made a quick song using it and built some accompanying visuals. After putting the video up the person who made the demo video that I sampled in this project, who I very prominently credited up front for this personal, unreleased, non-monetized project, made it abundantly clear through a barrage of comments and DMs that they were opposed to any use of his demo video that isn’t explicitly authorized, so this is gone now.
I've never understood that sort of mindset and, to be honest, I think that sort of thing is everything that’s wrong in the creative space. After they saw the posts (two weeks after I posted them and tagged them?) I was immediately bombarded with “This is illegal!” (it’s not) “All rights reserved, you can not use this!”
What this was is a fun personal project that I did, sampling their demo video, because it inspired me. If they’re unhappy with seeing their demo video re-contextualized, fine. But the aggressive bombardment of comments and DM’d threats due to a personal project that sampled some synthesizer demo footage, which again, was prominently credited to them right up front, is a massive bummer. It was needlessly aggressive, and that sort of mindset and approach discourages collaboration, drives people away from your work and the thought of engaging with it, limits exposure, creates an air of self-importance, and breeds creative isolation imho. This is a net negative for everybody involved. Nobody was making or losing money on this one-off, unreleased, short personal project.
While I don’t know the exact reason that my sampling of their demo video was such a massive issue for them, it’s their right to ask me to take it down and I tend to try and take the path-of-least-resistance, so it’s whatever. Just a bummer.
