For context, see https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/idank/object-stream-community-the-home-object-shows-deserve

The following is an ENTIRELY SUBJECTIVE REVIEW. This post does not intend to defame or accuse the Object Stream Community of any legal wrongdoing WHATSOEVER.

Please do not sue me.

Alright, let me preface this by saying that I am an avid OSC fan, OK? I have nothing against whatever pure, golden retriever-hearted intentions the creators might have had for this project, OK? I genuinely, (yes, genuinely) wish that copyright laws worked this well, OK? OK???? OK. Let’s jump straight into the problems.

One: this makes no sense

Let’s start reading: I’m 18, I live in Italy, yada yada yada, WAIT. Park the brakes. I smell chatgpt.

Now, don’t get me wrong, I have absolutely nothing against AI. Can’t exactly say the same for those 330 backers, though. Remember the comments of that one Humany video about Adobe’s AI “””Features”””? Crazy. They even say in their FAQ: “Nothing you see on Object Stream Community is generated: the logo, the mascots, the illustrations and the animations are all handmade by our team, and the platform will never use AI to create the content you see or to replace the artists this genre exists because of.”

Anyways, aside from the blatant ChatGPT, we can see some glaring inconsistencies. The premise is simple: embed and index YouTube videos on a separate streaming service so fans can more easily watch. What confuses me is that in the “Built the Right Way!” section they say that “When advertising goes live, personalized ads will be disabled for everyone under 18.” Brotha the ads are built into the embed, 10 seconds of Discord usage will tell you that. Do you plan to somehow disable the ads in the embed and show your own, at this “Live Date”? May I remind you that under Article 3(1) of the copyright directive in the EU (the jurisdiction of this project), and in the landmark case GS Media v Sanoma it was ruled that linking copyrighted material for financial gain, (LIKE showing adverts, personalized or not) that the burden of proof shifts to you to prove that you did not know it was infringing? It appears that either he’s not being completely honest about advertisements, or this is already in quite the legal gray area and he did minimal prior research. Let’s keep going.

Two: this still makes no sense

Dan keeps on babbling about “extreme security” and goes on to mumble about a series of tests that are actually industry standard in almost every web app you might come across. “deny-default firewall”, “written incident-response plan”, I’d wager that it’s pretty standard practice to write up a flowchart for security planning. My opinion is that all this filler is to distract you from the legal status of the operation. That FAQ section I mentioned earlier also made no mention of legality. In that FAQ, they mention “at first” they plan to only accept shows that carry a “verified mark”. (Tip: this is deliberate nonsense to hide the fact that they’ll never be able to get this many collaborations [at least, not as much as they show in their promotional material {Love of the S*n, BFNIF, BFDI, etc.}]. The platform will inevitably end up scraping most of their material without consent to fuel engagement, in my opinion.)

Three: this makes a dangerously little amount of sense

What really bugs me about this program is that they’re getting little kids to donate to this, and it’s useless to pretend like they’re not.

Legally, and under the Kickstarter ToU, people under 18 can’t contribute to kickstarter projects, for obvious reasons. Dan knows this, but he buries it in the FAQ. It doesn’t take much to convince a child, you know. Look back at the Reddit screenshot above. Look at babot_the_robot‘s post. Look at it. Does this look like how an 18 year old talks? Does a consenting adult 3 years away from drinking age say “im being fr btw [sic]”, or “Hope this [sic] become reality!”? No. They don’t. My guess is that in a couple years this will appear in a KiraTV video. Maybe that’s the truth we all have to cope with.

Four: what should i do?

If you’re some random OSC fan who stumbled upon this blog post, just evaluate the risks and move on with your life.

If you’re an OSC creator, and you agree with the points I’ve made, you should take steps to request your content taken down, should the need arise. Here I’ve put a link for a DMCA takedown form that you can generate and send to the creator should the need arise.

If you’re one of the people behind this, reading this blog post that I hope you’ll read, uhh hi I guess?

kthxbye