Youtube: The Ghetto of the Internet

Given the choice between the two of you, I'd take the ummm...seasick crocodile!

I have to get this out of my system.

Two days ago I got an email from Victor DeThouars saying I couldn’t use the word “Sera” in my youtube videos legally because he had copyrighted the name (he hasn’t, it’s a bluff, but one he clings to like fecal refuse on rectal fuzz).

In fact, here’s the email:

Dear Mr. Edmonds:

This a courtesy email to you, any one must have written permission for the use of the name of Sera(R), or Serak(R) This a registered trade mark. As you do not have written permission for using the Trade mark of Sera/Serak(R)

Let this email be a courtesy email to you, as you were once a member of our organization. Appreciate for you to refrain further use of the Trade mark Sera/Serak(R) in any public sales of Video's, CD, DVD, books or pamphlets, or any media used as of today world wide and to seize and desist

Full permission for the use of the Trade Mark Sera/Serak(R) is the Inosanto academy or any of the Full Gurus in Serak(R) associated with the VDT Academy, or any one of the legal schools under their own direction with full written permission.

You can contact us directly if you have any further question as to the use of Sera/Serak(R). Again this a courtesy email, for you to stop and refrain further use of our trade mark of Sera/Serak(R)

Now, one thing I don’t go around bragging about is my experience with the DeThouars family. Mostly because, in the Martial Arts world, it’s like bragging about your experience with genital herpes…It’s something you just don’t want the whole damn world knowing. And after blowing WELL OVER $12,000.00 (yeah, you read that right) in two years for training I never got, as well as costing me some SERIOUS relationship points with my wife, I decided discretion was the better part of valor and skipped town with an empty wallet and what little dignity I could scrape off the toilet. But one thing I am used to is the singsong patois of the mentally deficient Brothers D. I have long ago given up wondering why someone who has lived in this country for well over four decades can’t piece two sentences together coherently, even with the help of fucking spellcheck. I mean, I learned pretty fluent Indonesian in three years! Hell, even Pa Herman could speak better than the DeThouars after only 10 years here.

Having said that, after receiving the above email I had to take a few minutes to get the old idiot-O-meter running again. I mean, with such stellar grammar as “seize and desist” I still couldn’t figure out his angle…There’s no way he could copyright such a thing. It’s like trying to copyright the word “Milk” or something. And I’ve been doing Sera since 1993, way before I ever met Victor. So I told him to find some Dutch cheese and shove it up his fat ass.

Youtube, on the other hand, thought they were speaking to someone important enough to yank my entire account without warning or notice. How kind of them. Victor took the one cheap shot he could, and to be honest, not even his insane older brother Paul went that far, or the cult following that trails out three feet behind him.

I have always been a little suspicious of the glaring lack of support on youtube’s site, but over the past two years I have gotten used to uploading my videos and sharing them with the world. Now I wish I had never even bothered. If you read Mushtaq’s blog, you probably saw the “freak magnet” reference…I can thank youtube for bringing almost all of those freaks directly to my door before dropping me like a clingy girlfriend with jealousy issues. Like any internet society that has been left alone without any adult supervision and has had time to fester and become big, rich and stupid enough (youtube is owned by Google…And irony) it gets complacent and bored with the goals it started with and begins eating it’s own young, if not itself in an act of cyber cannibalism. (anybody here remember Infospace a few years ago? Of course not, nobody remembers anything on the internet for longer than a few days, if that.) A quick search on Google has shown me that youtube likes to suspend and delete accounts like it’s the last day of the January account suspension sale. Their terms of service clearly say that they can (and will) suspend your account without so much as a hidey-ho to you whenever they feel like it, and I suppose it’s my fault for relying on an internet corporation for some fair play. Apparently all you have to do is actually post one video on the site and that makes you entirely eligible for one free ticket to cyber Nazi butt rape from the baboon in the sysadmin department. And even if you do get your account reactivated, it’s like starting from scratch again because it’s a BLANK ACCOUNT.

And this is where youtube stops being fun and starts getting annoying, especially when they tell me that all you have to do is upload the same FUCKING BASTARD videos to the same FUCKING BASTARD account and it doesn’t matter that you have over 100 of the FUCKING BASTARD things to start out with and they take about 30 minutes to upload…Each.

Well I’m two pages into this and I still haven’t gotten it all out yet. This is taking longer than achieving an erection in a retirement home.

One thing that none of the DeThouars brothers counted on though, was my website, with it’s lovely web hosting service, Bluehost. If you’re shopping around for a competent web hosting site, I highly recommend them.

For starters, they attend to my accounts with the UTMOST urgency, as if I’m their only customer. They have easy to follow web templates for any service you can think of, and they sure as hell won’t suspend my account when I start loading my videos there.

Especially the Sera vids.

Fuck you Victor. That was your best shot? Getting my videos off youtube? If you were shooting for shit, you wouldn't get a whiff. I guess I shouldn't be surprised, it would be too much to ask that you handle the growth and evolution of you once-secret empire with grace and humility (you can look those big words up in a dictionary...Or have them read to you, either way). Especially at your advanced age. I mean damn, even the monkeys at the zoo eventually figure out where the bananas come from. What on Earth will you do when my Sera DVD's come out?

Okay, I feel better now!