Sometime in the past two or three weeks, Jim Clark’s poetryanimations channel at YouTube was terminated. Alex Cigale just discovered this today when going back to look at Clark’s video for the Russian Symbolist poet Zinaida Gippius. The notice on what used to be his account page reads,

YouTube account poetryanimations has been terminated because we received multiple third-party notifications of copyright infringement from claimants including:

* Walt Whitman House/Walt Whitman Association
* Walt Whitman House/Walt Whitman Association
* Walt Whitman House/Walt Whitman Association

So multiple complaints from a single source? Perhaps they objected to the use of some still image they held copyright on, since Clark’s technique was to “reanimate” dead poets through computer manipulations of photos or paintings, often with fairly realist results. I’ve only posted a couple, but Clark produced well over a hundred. Many of them can still be viewed at (and embedded from) DailyMotion, if you can put up with the ads. Here’s a Walt Whitman one to illustrate his technique (maybe one of the ones that sparked the complaint?):

It seems odd that Clark would put such a prominent copyright notice of his own on the video, since there’s no indication that he had permission to use Garrison Keilor’s audio. But what do I know?

The deadline is July 31. Here’s a New York Times article on the contest. For more, go to YouTube.com/play.

In other video-blogging news from the Blog Herald, the folks at Blogger have dramatically improved their free video-hosting system, but they still don’t allow embedding. Given that Blogger also doesn’t have an export tool that allows people to take their files with them, people who upload videos to Blogger at this point are basically consigning their uploads to a Blogger lockbox.