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A billion dollar media company just placed a copyright claim on a recent video I posted on FB/IG.
I pay to license every clip and song I use. I make $0 from any of these platforms. I make videos at a loss because I love telling stories. But a giant media company is claiming ownership over a free video that i paid a giant media company for the right to make.
Meta's notification was beyond unhelpful. It doesn't say which video was claimed. Doesn't say which song or clip in that video was the basis of the claim so I can replace it. It doesn't say how to appeal the claim, only that I have 7 days to do so.
It doesn't say what will happen if the claim is successful. Presumably they'll just claim ad revenue from it, which would be unfair, but also meaningless because THE PLATFORM ALREADY DOESN'T PAY ME.
They can't steal what they already weren't giving me. But there's something profoundly insulting about me paying a company money so I can make something I don't get paid for, that they'll lie about to another company that isn't paying me, so they can take the money I would have been paid if anyone involved in this process cared at all. And the process is automated to give the illusion that I have any say in it at all.
The truth is that I do not matter to these companies. The giant media company doesn't know I exist. An unsupervised AI was installed to print them free money by filing auto-generated content claims that have zero repercussions for false positives. Meta already isn't paying me, and I'll eat my hat if they reply to my message with any meaningful solution.
I am lucky that my followers do care. I am lucky that when the system is reminding me how little I matter, I get comments and DMs and emails from people who believe in the value of what I do. That's why I haven't left this platform, and why I'll probably keep making videos for the benefit of giant companies who don't know I exist but are still making money from it.
So I guess this is me saying thank you for treating my stories like they matter. Most days I believe that they do, and it's because of you.
STORY TRANSCRIPTION
Your message matters to us. No one has read your message.
Your message matters to us. Or rather, in theory, it will matter if anyone gets around to listening to it (which they won't).
Your message matters to us. Your message is a tree falling in an empty forest that a hiker fleeing a crumbling city will one day stumble across and marvel at the sound it must have made.
Your message matters to us. Your message is a coin flipped into a wishing well whose operations have been sold to Wishes Inc., a limited liability company which, for liability reasons, is unable to care about your message at this time.
Your message matters to us. Your message is a scribbled plea folded into a beer bottle hurled into a ocean foaming with messages that we would rather build a moon colony to flee to than actually deal with.
Your message matters to us. It matters so much we developed proprietary technology to automatically care about your message so it can matter as efficiently as possible without the need for human intervention.
Your message matters to us. You may feel your message is a star dying a cold, uncaring void, but please remember that the universe is expanding so fast that even dead stars are still shining somewhere, their light racing toward the edge of space where the laws of physics will finally confirm whether or not there is any more matter, and if any of it mattered at all.
...Short story written by Peter Chiykowski
website twitter facebook instagramStory prompt taken from a photo by Dominik Hofbauer
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