Well just a couple of weeks ago I wrote about Mircea Badea and yesterday I woke up to read a rather nasty email from YouTube.

The Antena Grup had reported me for “breach of copyright” for the tiny clip I had posted on Youtube of Mircea Badea savaging me and deleted the video. I then spent the next 45 minutes doing research and because I cannot dispute the fact that the clip does come from an Antena broadcast, my only recourse is to “consult with a copyright attorney” to dispute whether or not I can use it as part of the “fair use” doctrine. Obviously Google (the owner of YouTube) and the Antena Grup have copyright attorneys and I don’t, so the clip is going to remain permanently deleted.

What really stings though is that every time one gets reported for a “violation”, it adds a strike to your account and if you get too many of these, your entire account on YouTube gets deleted. I’ve already had trouble for using tiny clips for parts of my documentaries, all of which were fairly attributed (i.e. I listed the original creators and didn’t try to pass their works off as my own) and most importantly I’ve never made a cent from any of them. I’ve never tried to “monetize” my YT account (earning a percentage of ads) yet of course in this brave world we live in, the little people really can’t resist against corporate giants.

The Antena Grup have always been dicks, in general, even if they’re legally in the right here. They’re the only people who have never called me to interview me on TV and I’ve noticed that the journalists from all the other channels tend to avoid the Antena girls, who come across as frosty, haughty and aloof.

Having my humble little channel put at risk of deletion got me really depressed and so I began thinking of my own awesome footage that I’ve shot over the years. You probably remember my Kickstarter Project that never got funded. Well people still ask me about it every single week, wanting to know where they can see it.

To do it properly like I wanted to, I’d need to dedicate myself to it full-time and I can’t do that now because I’ve got to pay my bills. Nonetheless, I really still do believe in that project.

Thus I decided to publish tiny clips, the first of which is below. I don’t have time to subtitle the whole thing but I’ve chosen some brief bits that I think even someone who doesn’t speak Romanian can appreciate. Obviously if you do speak the language, you’ll get more out of it.

I also published two more of these short clips (all of them running less than 3 minutes), the rest you can find on my website HomeinessInRomania.com.

Enjoy!