How Partymanners Youtube site can stay up - forever.

[Jeff Mende]

By Jeff Mende

The agreement offer below was sent to Partymanners on Jan. 16 and again on Feb. 6, in a diligent effort to keep his Youtube site up permanently.

The email was initiated by me when, after a relationship of a number of years, it became increasingly apparent that Partymanners was deilberately attempting to chip away at my contribution - approximately 50 percent of all video content - to his Youtube sites.

It should be noted that I spent 14 long years - 1988 through 2002 - accumulating thousands of race videos on tape, as opposed to Partymanners' relative easy task of merely posting them.

The videos were originally offered to Partymanners out of generosity - nothing more. I even paid for the shipping. Not one time, however, in the years Partymanners and I were mailing tapes back and forth, did Partymanners offer one "thank you."

I would ask Partymanners to reveal any letter or email that contradicts his lack of gratitude.

More disheartening, was the fact that when Partymanners was contacted by the N.Y. Times, Partymanners "erroneously" failed to mention my contribution to the reporter.

As someone with a sports reporting background (nearly 20 years), I am aware how stories are produced. A reporter is not going to ask about an unidentified character unless the person being interviewed identifies that person.

The agreement offer to Partymanners as follows:

1). The front-page promotion or plug that you recently pared down is to be restored in its original and completed format on Partymanners and Partymanners2 and is to remain there for the life of the above-mentioned websites.

2). "Video contributed by Jeff Mende" will appear on every - with emphasis on every - video I contributed to the site, from the years 1988 to 2002. Without exception.

3). Commercial use of any race-related videos contributed by me (approximately 50 percent of the content on your Youtube sites), or commercial spin-off venture in any form, would require permission from the video's original owner (Jeff Mende) and copyright owners.

Fair or unfair?

If Partymanners agrees to the above in writing, his site will remain intact. There is nothing in the agreement that is burdensome.

It simply asks Partymanners to acknowldege my contribution to his Youtube sites and to agree not to use any videos I contributed for commercial purposes.

A benign agreement.

Will Partymanners sign the agreement, or will he continue to take false credit for videos he did not produce and continue to let his ego dictate the fate of his Youtube sites?

[sevenall]

Let's say that I believe everything that you are claiming (no gratitude, recognition, etc)...

Are you seriously going to impact all of the horse racing fans that love to watch the videos that you worked so hard on...just because you aren't given that recognition?

[depalma113]

You are not an owner of the content on any of the video tapes you gave to partymanners. You have absolutely no claim to any race on any tape that you provided. If you continue to claim ownership on that content, you are going to eventually find yourself in court having to defend those claims.

Do you understand that you can be sued for what you are doing? It will only take one actual owner of the content to make your life absolutely miserable.

Disney, CBS, NBC, and many others own that content. Your adolescent cries for attention are most likely going to get Partymanners' channels shut down. When the content owners decide that they should be paid for the illegal distribution of that video, they are going to come after you for making claims of ownership.

If partymanners or you are trying to profit from those videos, both of you may find yourselves in serious trouble. I don't believe partymanners is profiting form those videos. If he is, that is an issue he will have to deal with if the content owners come after him.

Stealing content is a crime. You can face both civil and criminal penalties for your actions.

Your attempt at a contract clearly shows you are blatantly making falsified claims of ownership of that content. You will lose in civil court and your lawyer will have a very hard time defending you if criminal charges are pressed.

I suggest you be very careful with what you are doing.

[KirisClown]

So much false information I have no idea where to start..

First, contact Ryan Goldberg yourself, I mentioned your name to him on the phone and also through email.. Not sure how many times I need to tell you this.. I had NO CONTROL OVER WHAT WAS WRITTEN, he wanted to interview ME and what motivated ME to have the channel..

Why on earth would i chip away at your contributions? What would I have to gain? You realize when you made your first false ownership claims, you claimed at least 5 videos that you didnt even contribute? Also, you never sent any video of a race from 2002.. How can you ask me to agree to terms that are littered with false info? 50% of my channel is your videos? Absolutely not.. I've spent the good part of the last week extracting all of the videos from the channel..

As far as me not saying thank you.. That's the furthest thing from the truth and you know it.. shortly ill do a screen capture of emails I sent you.. I paid shipping too btw.. The fact is, you wanted more thank yous and attention than I could give you.. I've known plenty of people from message boards for years, I think they'd said I'm a pretty nice person.. I'm not some ungrateful villain you're trying to make me out to be.

I've recorded a couple thousand races myself.. I know what goes into it. I also had other people sending me videos too.. you even tried to claim theirs as your own.. Easy Goer's Whitney is an example..

I'd love to know what you think I gain from doing all the work on the channel? Some sort of fame or fortune? There's none to be had.. it's done solely as an archive for fans.. .not to plug or promote people..

[KirisClown]

I've never used any videos on my site for commercial purposes.. I never intended to..

You think it's MY ego standing in the way? It's the other way around..

[WinterTriangle]

Depalma, I don't believe he is saying he owns the content. Anymore than a public library owns the content of a book, tape, record, or video. But libraries DO make compilations available, and there is labor and expense involved in doing so.

Jeff, I see nothing at all wrong with asking for attribution for your work of "accumulating" this content. I believe many people were upset with you because partymanners video postings were pulled.

However, I would not be at all upset, if you have legal ownership of these COPIES of racing tapes, that are compiled, to ask that they be used just as anyone would use a book borrowed from a public library. Libraries LEND books, they do not own the content, because the author and publisher own that.

However, libraries DO make tapes, books, and records, and even paintings, available to people, in a readily "consumable" format. If it weren't for libraries, I would have to go out and find every book I ever want to read, and they will NOT be in one place, either.

Attribution for keeping, compiling, and organizing.......that is in the form of a card or stamp inside the book, saying that 'this copy" is owned by the public library. They are not sayng they own the content, just the copy.

Therefore, anyone borrowing a library book shouldn't sell it, keep it, or lend it out to anyone else unless that card remains intact in the book, and the book makes the rounds........ but always returns to where it belongs.

If I am undertanding you correctly, you are not claiming ownership of the content, but ownership of the compilation of the content. You are saying you did labor to compile it all in one place and place on tapes.

Not knowing the situation, I can't comment further. The way I am seeing this, not knowing about legal stuff, is that you own some compilations that Partymanners is borrowing. Otherwise, partymanners can go to each site where there are videotaped races, and download and compile them himself, then upload them to YouTube.

Am I understanding this correctly? To me, you are making racing videos available, so that partymanners can in turn make them more available to people on YouTube.

Personally, I can pay for, and find, any race I ever want to watch, but I do appreciate having it available in one place, and for free. Otherwise, I would have to do quite a lot of legwork to get them all, wouldn't I?

[KirisClown]

Just a portion of the email correspondence I had with the NY Times guy... Read it Mr Mende.. you see your name mentioned..


I started posting videos on YouTube in February of 2006... amazing that it's already been three years... I had no plans at all on it being as big or as much work as I've put into it.. Initially I was having a discussion on a message board about the very fast 3yr old filly of 1996 Capote Belle.. that week I had started using new software called Roxio that allowed for video capturing... I could hook up the vcr to my computer and capture the old vhs videos I had onto the computer and make video files out of them.. I decided Id do it for Capote Belle's Test Stakes to add to the discussion I was having.. It was all basically just for fun.. YouTube was a little more difficult to use back then, they limited the size of the files and the time length they could be.. so some races were tricky.. The quality of the videos wasn't the best at first either.. the site has come a long way from just 3yrs ago..
As I began looking through old videos.. I found many of Cigar, Holy Bull, Skip Away etc.. and figured people would really enjoy seeing them again, especially Cigar since there's really nowhere to see his races outside of his Breeders Cup performances... I know when I first got into racing I would loved to have seen some of the geat races of the past, but it was nearly impossible, unless a short clip happen to be shown on a racing program.. I get enjoyment now from allowing the past races to be seen again.. keeping the old names alive in visual memory.. no long do people have to just read about a race, they can see it for themselves.. The enjoyment I get fuels my desire to keep doing it.. it can be very time consuming.. but well worth it to build the archive for the racing fans and myself..
A majoriy of the vidoes I've posted have come from old VHS tapes I have, I used to record racing off of TV all the time.. I had no schedule planned intially, just races I chose randomly that I thought would be fun to see again.. now Im working year by year, presently working on 1999.. The past year Ive had a lot of help with my archive through video donations, a friend of mine named Jeff Mende has contributed greatly and I thank him for that. I try to do a few uploads each day.. some days I'll miss and others I'll upload as many as five.. I like to mix in the present races as well.. the triple crown preps.. the Derby, Preakness, Belmont.. Grade I's I think are important.. horses like Zenyatta etc.. videos I know people want to see.. The pace has picked up greatly over the past year.. the more videos I have, the more urgency I feel to post them to get the job done... It's a very long way from being complete.. but it's steadily getting there, and I'm proud of the work I'm doing..
Let's see my favorite trainers, horses.. jockeys.. start with horses.. Holy Bull, Sky Beauty, Inside Information, Heavenly Prize, Flanders, Kiri's Clown, Awad, Mecke, Devil His Due, Colonial Affair, Bertrando, Free House, Cardmania, Wallenda, Lure, Paradise Creek, Concern.. many many others.. Jockeys, well Jerry Bailey was the best I've seen, only after his retirement did I really appreciate how great he was.. I also enjoyed Mike Smith, Pat Day, Chris McCarron, Jorge Chavez and Eddie Delahoussaye.. As far as trainers.. my favorite will probably always be Shug McGaughey.. do in large part to the fact that I was and still am an enormous fan of the Phipps horses.. the breeding, the history.. the black and cherry silks.
As far as the effect my work will have.. I hope I have filled some of the void.. racing has such a great history.. so many wonderful races of the past.. races thet need to be seen again by fans, both new and old fans.. even old races can stir passion, excitement and heated discussion for the sport.. Without YouTube, so many of the great races would still go unseen, racing has to draw on it's past and celebrate it. Nowadays the sport needs all the exposure it can get.. I hope that my work has helped to expose it a bit more.. to show just how great racing can be.. and to keep those wonderful old horses alive in the memories of the fans..
The racetracks certainly can post from their archives.. NYRA's YouTube page has posted a few.. I requested Inside Information's Acorn and I was thrilled that they did it for me... Imagine how awe inspiring their page could be if they devoted time to posting all the great races from Belmont and Saratoga... what a treat that would be.. I don't think racetracks realize the treasures they have in their replay archives..
I've written a lot... if I've left anything out or if you have further questions.. let me know..
Jim

[Dahoss9698]

Dude you suck. You're being petty and jealous.

You don't own the footage. To think you do is delusional. The only thing you are doing is robbing past, present and future fans a chance to watch races. As it stands you have a thank you on the main page. A very gracious (who really cares who you were employed by?) promotion that is actually bigger than the one Partymanners has for himself.

[thorobasePA]

This is a ridiculous scenario.

Cross-posted from original Partymanners thread

It's time to do something about this. If we organize ourselves, we can crowd-source the archiving of Partymanners/KirisClown's YouTube racing channel. We cannot risk losing this archive. Here is my solution:

Using the YouTube APIs, I wrote some code to create a spreadsheet with the name and link to every video uploaded by 'partymanners' - over 2000 of them. The spreadsheet is publicly accessible to view and edit (max 200 viewing at same time, max 10 editing at same time) here:

http://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?k...ySEx3elE&hl=en

This is what it looks like:

The X in the "Downloaded?" column means someone has downloaded a copy of that race video to their local hard drive (In this case it's me). The "% Complete" cell will automatically keep track of how far along are we.

Right now we are only concerned with having a digital copy of the YouTube videos on partymanners' channel, so the focus is on many of us downloading as many of the videos we can and we will later organize the collection of videos downloaded those involved to upload to a new service and create a historical racing video archive for all to enjoy.

To help, follow these 6 simple steps:

1. Go to the spreadsheet and pick a line in the sheet that hasn't yet got an "X", then click on the cell for the URL (the website address) for that video - a little blue box will appear on the left, and when clicked, will take you to the YouTube video itself - and copy the URL contents of that cell.

in this example, I'm going to download Ghostzappers' 2003 Belmont Allowance race

2. Go to www.keepvid.com and, in the URL textbox, enter the URL you copied above, and then press the Download button

3. It will take the KeepVid.com web service a few seconds to process the video, but you will be presented with a number of links to download the video from - I would recommended those on high-speed broadband connections (i.e. the majority of people) to download the MP4 High-Quality version. If your network speeds are quite slow, choose the low quality version and make a note of that.

Right-click on your chosen link, and click "Save Link As..." or similar

4. Save the video with a name associated with that race and YouTube link. For instance, I saved this video as "hpmrXF1uOUg Ghostzapper2003Alw.mp4" so I know exactly which video this refers to. Sometimes the YouTube ID format is not compatible with file names allowed by your operating system, so just pick a name that matches up somehow to the spreadsheet. This is important, as when we later collate our downloaded videos, we need to know which is which.

5. Mark an "X" in the "Downloaded?" column of the row of the video you have just downloaded. The "% Complete" value will auto-update.



If someone has already downloaded a video you would really like to also download, please consider first downloading a video that has yet to be marked as downloaded. If you download a video that someone has already marked as downloaded, place another X in that column so that we know we should have multiple sources for that video.

6. Finally, and most importantly, after you have downloaded your videos for that day/session etc., email me at admin@thorobase.com with the details of the videos you have downloaded (IDs, race names, or row numbers) so I can match up your email address with the videos at a later date.

We will get around to organizing a server to upload these archived videos at a later date.

Please, please help me in saving KirisClown/Partymanners' wonderful collection, and try to contribute as much resources and time as you can. The sooner we get this done, the less chance we lose this archive to pettiness. Spread the word by email, Twitter, Facebook, whatever, to your racing buddies so they can help out too.

Me on Twitter

Thank you

[thorobasePA]

Originally Posted by KirisClown

...I've spent the good part of the last week extracting all of the videos from the channel...

Uh oh, maybe my efforts weren't needed after all. Not to worry. What do you say KirisClown - is this crowd-sourcing needed?

As to the OP, surely it is beyond clear that your continued efforts to shut down the YouTube channel for 'recognition' you feel is deserved, has destroyed any goodwill to you from the very people you want 'recognition' from?

[depalma113]

Depalma, I don't believe he is saying he owns the content. Anymore than a public library owns the content of a book, tape, record, or video. But libraries DO make compilations available, and there is labor and expense involved in doing so.

With all due respect, what you believe does not matter. This is not a fair use issue. His making of tapes does not give him any rights to the content of those tapes. His time and effort are meaningless.

He is making an ownership claim on Youtube. One cannot make an ownership claim based on the format of the content. One can only make an ownership claim based on content.

One must either be the owner of the content or a representative of the owner of the content to make that claim. As far as I know, he has not been hired by any of the companies that own that content to speak for them.

He is breaking the law by making a false claim of ownership. He does not own the content. He has absolutely no right to make any claim whatsoever.

His ownership of the tapes is irrelevant to the issue.

[KirisClown]

On a final note..

I am not the bad guy here, Jeff.. no matter how much you want people to believe I am.. I am not.. All of my work is done for one purpose and that is the average race fans enjoyment and education. I've never sought any recognition for the work.. The NyTimes article was written specifically to find out who I was.. no one knew for the first few years.. I'd be plenty happy right now if they still didn't know..

The channel is not about me or you, or the five other people who have donated videos, even a racetrack has donated 15 videos to the channel.. I believe the longevity/success of the channel is due to no one seeking to profit from it or intentionally gain notoriety from it in any way shape or form...

When you have the Partymanners channel taken down the only people who suffer are fans of racing, you're pretty much taking down their channel.. The anger you have for me you actually end up taking out on them..

[Jeff Mende]

The bottom line is that Partymanners site is still up - and will likely stay up - as long as a few things are worked out. He knows how to contact me.

The fact is, Partymanners hasn't handled this situation well from the start. He accepted 14 years of someone's work without any empathy or understanding for the passion and effort it took to produce those videos.

Case in point: Didn't the frenzy over the temporary removal of Partymanners site offer ample evidence to the importance of the videos in question?

Why did Partymanners not see this? Why does he still not see this?

Why would Partymanners ignore any attempt to open up a dialogue with the person who made a generous, major contributution to his site?

Did you know that he failed to answer every email I sent him over the last few months?

Why would Partymanners slander any person in a public forum?

Was anyone aware that the plug of my contribution on the front page of Partymanners' Youtube site was initiated by me?

That I had to email him frequently over the years to remind him to credit me with individual videos I contributed?

If someone contributes 14 years worth of stakes races to your site, wouldn't you make a point of showing your appreciation to that person?

I don't really care what commentary is offered here. Please make the distinction: This is not a personal issue. It's about standing up for what's right.

And there's been plenty of hate distributed without a full hearing.

We still do that in this country, don't we?

Switching gears slightly, let me suggest that I understand what Partymanners' Youtube site means to him and the viewers. It's who he is. I get it. It's what we want. I get it.

I knew what contributing the videos to Partymanners could potentially do for all with a passion for racing - and it has accomplished that.

Probably far beyond Partymanners' wildest imagination.

But I had no idea how ungrateful the person was I was sending them to.

Although it's never to late to say you're sorry or that you appreciate someone else's assistance in reaching your goals.

No good deed goes unpunished.

[Watcher]

Could Jeff have come off like any more of a whiney megalomaniac? I've know 4 year olds that demand less attention and recognition...

[WinterTriangle]

maybe partymanners or mende can explain because I am not taking sides.

Working in publishing and film industries there are an awful lot of "thank you's" at the end of every book and film, to anyone who helped make it possible.....(probably anybody that even brought you a sandwich. ) You usually leave the theatre before those start scrolling, and don't read those pages in your books...........but I can assure you, they're THERE.
The courtesy of thanking any and all contributors, while a well-established way of doing business, is important to some..... and not so much to others.

I taped tennis matches from TV for 10 years. ( I understand I don't own the content. ) if somebody wanted to put my tapes up on YouTube, I'd have no problem, but, since I saved them having to compile all those tapes, I know I would be delighted if they mentioned me on the site.....as well as others who helped the endeavor.

Obviously, whatever magnitude of "thank you's" required fell short for Mr. Mendes............. unless there were none at all?

(That's all I was {trying} to express to Depalma as he descended into legalize that had nothing to do with what I said.)

Courtesy is the glue that keeps the society together, and keeps people from killing each other.

So, could you guys tell me if my point about my tennis tapes being lent out, and posted, and just wanting to get a thank you for lending my compilation, is sort of what is going on here?


If yes.......Thank you's are simple. How did this get so complicated?