Brandon Strader

I am, I read about 50% of it approximately, will check it over again and finish it probably tomorrow. Did OCR get some kind of certificate when they became an LLC? Saw one of those recently. I've been a stickler for details, some of which might be pretty sensitive, but I'm basically a Meeseeks--once it's solved to satisfaction you'll see me disappear. That more or less was accomplished after much push back and forward, though the way I was demonized by djp is still really embarrassing, especially after all these years. He may be really mad at me but that's par for the course; things seem to have resolved pretty positively for the situation as a whole regardless of anyone's personal feelings. Ultimately I think most of this could have been avoided if the information was introduced first (two months ago). It was a ton of fighting and misinformation and arguing over stuff, because nobody knew anything, and it took a couple days before satisfying answers were even shared. And maybe now people are pissed at me cause like chicken little I said the sky was falling. Like chicken little I acted on what I knew at the time. Like chicken little I can be a bit of an asshole when I'm sharing opinions, but people love chicken little anyway. At any rate I may have been extremely careless with some of my messages, but I did not have malicious intent. Careless, but not intent.

My main one has been on youtube since 2011 Should I comment on the other stuff said...... hmmmmmm...... probably not. Though I do want to point out my stuff is already mastered, so if it saves time, feel free to skip those. Especially since changing it would probably mess them up, and you can't actually affect perceived volume to a noticeable degree without editing it so drastically that it becomes garbage.

I don't remember if I actually said that, did I? Cause if I did that way crosses any line, by no means would I compare OCR or its staff to Crooked Hillary And no I've had this sig for ... a while This also very much satisfies me, and if monetization occurred while these steps were planned to be taken then I should be fine with it too. If anyone's right now saying "I support this" to spite me, maybe my intentions weren't expressed properly, but hopefully nobody's actually doing that.

I'm sorry, i apologize, especially for statements I made based on personal feelings that are probably not true. I DID say it wasn't fair to do that, so I shouldn't have tried to use that as any kind of statement, on previous days.

I think brushing off peoples' opinions and saying they don't matter isn't the right approach.. I'm not saying anyone needs to take all the comments 100% to heart, but these are real comments and real concerns.. I tried not to include ones that were just being mean, and I tried to include ones that were fair, people like @Sagnewshreds who commented on shizz did share and could reshare his thoughts here if he wants and importantly I linked to the THREAD so people could read ALL of the comments, I gave up at some point, there was just too many.

Continuing to scapegoat me is embarrassing for everyone. I decided after the ban that the free ride was over for you guys, if you're going to ban me permanently then you've probably already made up your mind on doing that. You've expertly persuaded people that I'm the problem and the only person outraged by what happened, multiple times mentioned conspiracy theories, accused me of not reading or ignoring answers. Now you're threatening to ban me because of my statements, opinions, or speculation. I do feel that character and personal interactions is valid evidence, and while it may not be FAIR to use that as evidence, people have done so against me for quite a long time here, so I see it as an option. It's not at all fair, but grudges based on past experiences rarely are. If my assumptions are wrong and you are offended then I apologize, but assumptions are being made about me too. The conversation is too much about me, and not about all of the people affected by this and the many people who have also shared their opinions. Enough about me, here are some thoughts from people who may or may not be registered for the forum, whose identities (for the most part) won't be shared to prevent them being abused or harassed. Because yes, that's a real concern from OCR. This is just a few, there are many more out there: "what a mess. i see DJP chasing his words. even chimpazilla chimed in. i suppose we agree to it when we submit the music. but its unfair. they should stay free. from what i understand, they joined a network which auto monetizes ur channel. its to reach more people but they still getting paid. its a format that labels do nowadays to fund the label, but we are getting sales on the music and its officially licensed. ocremix is falling behind imo" "I think y'all go insane whenever the topic of money comes up at OCR. I don't know why everyone keeps releasing their music for free on OCR when they could very likely get a license for it and make at least a little bit of money on it. "Founded in 1999, OverClocked ReMix is an organization dedicated to the appreciation and promotion of OverClocked ReMix." This sort of debate has been ongoing for many many years and is the reason why I kept away from OCR. I don't need respect from the people of OCR. Non-profit or not, OCR has NO legal grounds to operate on. OCR is only able to exist on the goodwill of the copyright holders of the music that is being remixed and distributed. There is no "failsafe" for if and when a large company like Square, Nintendo, Microsoft, etc decides that enough is enough and they are ready to put an end to it. Even if a remix using someone else's track as source is being released for free, the artist or organization still MUST pay a statutory royalty fee to the copyright holder, which is something like 9.1 cents for one composition used in a track less than 5 minutes long. If OCR really wants to clean up their legality act then they're going to have to start applying for licenses and charging for downloads. I'm pretty sure I tried explaining it a few years ago when we were going through legal issues of our own, but you can imagine how well people responded to that? Doing things legally would require OCR to completely change the way they brand themselves. OCR takes SO MUCH pride in the fact that "we don't make any money!" I mean seriously, how is that something to be proud of? It's laughable lol And now in order to start operating within legal parameters they'd have to get rid of that "free music" mentality, which is probably the most controversial thing they could do to their loyal fan base after 17 years of spouting "free music" nonsense. And while I don't believe the admins are raking in the benjamins from all of this ad revenue, it certainly wouldn't kill them to put some of that money into making the site not look like 1999." "How likely is it that our album will become popular if we send it to OCR? here is what i think: if OCR will bring us views and popularity, we might wanna let them monetize our tracks, but if not..... eerm, i don't know. ok in this case: I wouldn't be against illegal monetization if this will make our project popular, but of not - screw these criminals . ahaha i know i misuse a lot of words a expressions, but i think you got the gist. i trust you on this one so i will accept any your decision but i would prefer putting up with them monetizing shit because in this case everyone will learn about us and we'll get fame and chicks." "From that thread it seems like High Lord DJ Pretzel pulled the wool over your eyes. It's a combination of the ruling class and the Big Corporations (YouTube) monetizing your creations. This is the price you pay when you host your remixes on OverClocked Remix. Might as well draw a pentagram on the ground in your own blood and sit in it." "I get the desire to make money off of it, but I'm gonna say no. If you want to get paid you can put up a bandcamp or something and sell an album/ep worth of music people want to buy." "I realize OCR has operating costs, but if the people that created the arrangements aren't getting any money and OCR is, that is very uncool. If it's one of those things where OCR isn't getting money and the copyright holders are, I don't really care. There is a difference to me. OCR is not paying for the cost of hosting and streaming the videos." "As for the whole money issue, DJ Pretzel laid it all out in that thread that Strader linked and they barely make any money off of YouTube and operate as a non-profit organization so they have to be diligent about their money for the IRS. But please don't let your bias get in the way of learning what is actually going on." "OCR has straight up bullied me on twitter as recently as two years ago by butting into conversations where I was talking about events that happened on OCR to someone else (and did not even mention them by name) and then they sicced their goon squad on me and my mentions were flooded with people trash talking me for having a dissenting opinion (which was much more polite than what I've said in this thread). I pretty much lost any remaining respect for OCR after that." Many of these are from facebook conversations, a few from theshizz, and there are more comments on the Facebook secret community as well which people might have to be invited to see it. I KNOW that some people's comments may be hurtful, but I respectfully ask that people don't go searching these people out to yell at them or anything. Every individual community / group seems to be having their own conversation about this, the best that can be done is to make a centralized info hub. I don't know why or how this got indented.

Scapegoating, confirmation bias, cognitive dissonance, we can throw around any number of terms of what our opposition does, but that is not in any way productive

Your bullet points are nice and I did speculate on some things, in this thread, but I don't represent OCR so people have little incentive to believe what I'm saying as being the policy of OCR. They can read the thread for themselves, including your responses. If you want to attack what I've said or scapegoat me, then fine. But you aren't getting out of defending your actions, including going behind everyone's back. And if you claim there's no grounds for bad faith based on what you have done, you're wrong. If you think I've ignored anyone's answers because I continued to talk, you're wrong. There's a difference between ignoring someone and disagreeing with them. I simply didn't find their personal opinion to be a satisfying explanation for why something is done the way it is. If your site needs an oversight committee to make sure things are above bar, there's a problem. And I'll repeat what I said earlier in the thread in regards to people being paid--if you can prove it's false, i'll retract the statement. Either way whether people are being paid or not is not a huge issue, the issue is whether it's done legally. The huge issue with this site is whether you do anything legally or ethically. If you want to cry about libel, how about first crying about the laws you've broken or may be breaking? Your own staff at least between Larry and zircon can't even decide whether remixes itself is illegal or covered by fair use and perfectly fine. Larry says " From what I understand, believing that was OCR does is a valid instance of Fair Use, we believe the ReMixes do not diminish the original work's value, and that the music is being presented for nonprofit educational purposes to advance knowledge of the arts through the addition of something new and transformative. That would be a scenario where, because of the Fair Use case, OCR 1) would not be required to seek licenses for the music, and 2) would not pay the artists because the derivative works would be created for profit rather than for nonprofit educational purposes." Zircon says "it's always been illegal"

Is scapegoating in any way necessary I've done my best to try to present the facts as stated and link to this thread so people can see everything for themselves

my sight has gone blurry from typing / reading on the phone for too long. Please don't think I'm dodging re asking the questions but for now I kinda need to until my eyes recover I will just ask the important important one , will or can projects specifically be made void of the monetization plan, unless the entire project opts in to it to begin with. There's way more than enough content monetized even without doing the projects specifically. The peplum is what was done in the past and what people expected vs. the new proposal of ads. Some peoples who signed the consent form for projects probably didn't read the content policy at all. Maybe for some English is a 2nd or 3rd language. I know artists like this so if you could explain a little about projects I'd appreciate that

The conversation with artists has to be had, I still feel that an email should be sent out. The mailing list also used to include people who didn't have forum accounts, I don't know if it still does, and many artists do not have forum accounts, so I don't think just posting here flies for everyone whose opinion matters. That's part of why I posted the discussion on fb and mentioned it on theshizz, but beyond that, there's a fair amount of artists I met through YouTube or VK or whatever who have no account here either. To be fair they also wouldn't see the email. Maybe some kind of simple webpage/wiki page that could be sent out with all the info would be the best, I don't know. Maybe a hashtag included that they could tweet to. @ Larry - An audit would probably make me pretty comfortable. Hiring a lawyer to state whether the monetization is legal would also help and maybe the cost to get an evaluation would be worthwhile, for everyone not just for me. There's a lot of people with the same concerns and while I may seem like the most vocal think of all the artists who can't say anything or don't want to be demonized so they refuse to post. I know people who wont post for that reason and I know from extensive experience that their concerns are legitimate. I also know that these people don't consent just because they're silent on the issue. Theres people saying site ads are different from ads on the third party YouTube upload, other people see it differently. At this point I think uploading mixes at all should be opt-in, if artists don't want to put their song on ocr's YouTube page at all. For the record I see it differently, I think monetizing the free YouTube upload, which isn't even really mentioned as a 'benefit' of submitting in clear terms, is not the same as site ads, and the YouTube upload could be optional altogether while the artist would still be adhering to the content policy as written. I do think the distinction is there, because the site ads go to keep the site running and are on the site, while the YouTube ads are off-site on a service everyone knows is free. Not licensing the monetized YouTube uploads is an issue, and it changes the game in regards to how a publisher will see OCR. I think how that relationship changes is yet to be seen. All of the artists do need to be informed of this change before any decision can be made. It's not so much about keeping me happy, as it is about making sure everybody knows exactly what is going on, how the situation has changed and ads introduced on YouTube. Any way you cut it, everyone needs to know and needs to approve of that. I don't know who slimy is but he's reducing what I said - I wouldn't pull everyone's work (existing released or unreleased) off of OCR without their consent, if it becomes something I have to do, either due to artists not wanting to consent to the ads or people deciding they don't want to be involved with OCR at all, then it might be something we have to consider, we being me and the project members, honesty I am still thinking of the one that is still secret when I'm talking about this. I know full well that OCR would put someone else in charge of finishing the projects that started here like ff8 if I were to just up and abandon it. Pretty sure people's allegiance is with FF8 and OCR than it is with me when it comes to the ff8 album, a director is expendable for specifically OCR community generated projects, we saw that with ff9. I also don't agree with the distinction of the 2 month monetization of NEW mixes is different from monetizing everything and is less nefarious. Fresh new material is being seen, getting views, it's active content that while it's a lot less than 3K uploads, it's a lot more active, of course this is my guess or assumption, nobody is being notified to listen to the old mixes. Would 100 views per 3k vids add up to the amount of views for of the new vids over the last 2 months? I would wager the new vids together had more collective active views than the old content. So I don't really agree with not monetizing everything as being less nefarious. If anything, monetizing everything might have made it more obvious to a lot more people of what was happening. i probably have more I want to discuss and have people's chime in on but I'm at the breaking point of typing on this phone, it disappoints me greatly and just ate up 30% of my battery yes politics are stupid, let's not bring those up. Larrys a coolguy.

I was actually referring more to a secret project that is 95% done and that I was going to send in as a surprise, but a lot of the artists are not down with the new policy. In regards to any collab mix posts of course the collaborator gets a say, I wouldn't go behind their back and make a decision that affects their work without asking them. I don't do that kind of thing. About moving projects off site--like I've said I don't feel it is my responsibility to contact everyone currently on for example FF8 and FF3, give them the facts and see if they still support the project. Every single artist needs to be emailed and asked, and if a considerable amount of them aren't interested, further decisions on the future of the album have to be made which might just lead to cancellation depending on how many people pull out. It would be a shame for ff3 to get knocked back a year in production. By "pull" it'd probably be more accurate to say put on hold, either way before anything can be released their consent has to be given and the news information about monetizing their work. It won't be done to them against their consent and in secret. I am running the album projects, not the community, and not some executive producer in title only -- and with the EXPLICIT CONSENT of all artists involved, many of whom were recruited with the assurance that they were NON-PROFIT FAN TRIBUTES. Someone needs to send the email detailing that is no longer the case, and it's not gonna be me. If I have to contact every artist for something that basically changes the intent of the release, it's not going to tell them their songs are being monetized but not licensed, it'll be to ask them if they're alright/cool with releasing somewhere else for free / non-profit with no ads. Feel however you want to feel about me or my trolling conspiracies, but right now I'm preparing for how things are going to work off of OCR. If caring about people and not betraying them like has been done here is egotistical, then you go Brandon, savior of VGM and remixing.

Getting increasingly skeptical and disinterested as questions are danced around instead of answered, while money is still being made off of the videos... No company would get this much leeway and get to sit on their thumb for this many days. If you're monetizing everything and nothing's changing then just say that so I can pull everything down and move my projects off site

Why the monetization of projects needs to be addressed-- I don't have the time or effort to go back and ask every single person I've recruited whether they are cool with ocr monetizing the uploads. Of the 5 or so people I've asked so far on current projects, they've been strongly against it. Basically this would be a death sentence for the projects, so an answer about this needs to be given. If monetization of projects didn't happen then I could still see myself working on projects here but otherwise it probably wouldn't happen.

I think your argument isn't worth wasting the time to debate because it's needlessly close minded, so have a good day

Weird Al is protected by satire/parody laws and moves on out of respect to the original artist, not because he legally has to. Not at all the same

I would like to see the printed albums actually given for free, and not packaged together with a T-Shirt sale.. that always seemed to me like the wrong way to essentially sell the album. The big difference between ads on the site and ads in the music, is that the ads on the site are known to directly support the site and are activated upon visiting the site, they're fully part of the site. The ads on the music or on the page where the music is set to play when you click on the link and activate the music, is completely different in that it's directly involved in the music. Beyond that like I mentioned earlier, stacking something illegal on top of something else illegal isn't ideal -- we've gotten away with remixing due to good will from the publishers who have even supported what we've done, and I don't really endorse throwing their good will back in their face by trying to now make money off of the free fan arrangements, especially without the permission of the content creators or the publishers. There was an outrage when Nintendo started monetizing Let's Play videos from their fans, and that severely hurt Nintendo's reputation with the youtube community, and a lot of people. I don't see this as being much different if at all different from that, but the major difference being that OCR doesn't have a right to monetize the content and Nintendo did as the owner of the original material. People said it was unethical for their hard work making Let's Plays to be monetized by Nintendo like that. Let that sink in -- people just playing a video game and talking over it said it was unethical, for that work, to be monetized. Trying to say I willingly cooperated in an illegal music ring isn't really going to make me feel better about adopting further questionable things. Maybe I'd be ok with this if the publishers were notified and gave their approval. Maybe I'd be ok with this if every artist was notified through email and were asked their opinion, before the monetization had taken place. Right now it looks like the decision is set in stone but I'll hold out hope for further details about what specifically is going to be monetized, whether we can opt out, etc from Dave. Or maybe it'll be dropped entirely. While monetizing all 3k mixes might make a pretty penny, if you had just asked people to donate they might have been more open to that. We used to do support OCR month before the patreon, and it used to get decent money. Now much more than that is received every month through patreon. It's like having support OCR month all year. If you really wanted extra cash to squirrel away in case of a Y2K situation, I think the better approach would have been to ask people or promote the patreon / promote a donation day. The way this was approached was really bad.

They're literally not licensing the music owned by copyright holders. If that's not illegal, I don't know what is. And they've said what OCR has done all along has been illegal according to them, so why nonchalantly stack more illegal offenses on top of that? Either way I'm not interested in any particular user's interpretation of the law. I've asked my questions and I've said what the result of the answers to those questions would be. Being exploited and being dishonest with us, they're also trying to do that to the copyright holders, none of it is right.

I don't have you ignored @zircon and up to now I have been impressed and respected your responses especially when I've gone all in, and while not legally licensing the music is problematic (I might have been able to overlook some of the other issues if this was done legally), the other questions right now are of much higher importance

No answers.....come on. This is important. I can guarantee you that whether my mixes stay on the site or projects continue hinges on the answer to the 2nd question. I refuse to let people who don't respect me profit from my work, illegally I might add.

Will the music that is monetized be licensed, and royalties given to the copyright owners. And will we be able to opt out of monetization with our collective works, including entire albums. Would any amount of response across OCR, Facebook, heck even theshizz, have any impact whatsoever in changing the outcome of this situation. I'm going to bed. Will check this and hopefully countless more answers in the P.M.

According to DJP on Facebook earlier, nobody consented to what is happening because the content policy was designed (in 2007 - important point!) to allow them to weasel any number of things into its meaning due to its vague language, before each money making platform existed. Is my paraphrasing loaded enough? Dunno if it is. You can sweet talk the most reprehensible thing into sounding acceptable with the right language. Not my style.

Is it so much to ask.... seriously, someone answer me, because I know this is going to look like a rhetorical question, but I assure you it's not. Is it SO much to ask that the people in charge approach any decision ethically, and with legality in mind? Was it really worth alienating 80% of people, including those who have left the site or observing from outside? Not telling anyone about it for 2 months and hoping to Money God that they wouldn't notice? All to have a failsafe in case suddenly Y2K happens? Why does OCR cause the stock for snake oil to rise every couple of months? Most importantly, how can we trust people who to date, have attempted to do things in a shady or illegal manner on multiple occasions, then laugh it off? This whole situation is a clusterfuck of ethics violation and potential illegalities. And I bet you the monetized videos are still up right now. And I bet you these people think they're going to get away with profiting off of unlicensed material like they tried to do with the first FF6 Kickstarter, before it got taken down, for exactly this line of thought. This thread is an interesting discussion, but before there could be any discussion about who should be paid what or why, OCR will have to survive an audit and whatever hoops it takes to become a 501c3. Square-Enix is gonna come knocking for that back pay, and more sanctions.

Sell it to Doug Arley or Jake Kaufman for the pittance it'll be worth when Google Ads and Patreon go out of business

Who is an employee, the guy uploading the video, or the guy creating the content of the video? I think a site full of silent videos would be rather drab. But if you think they could monetize that and profit, be my guest.