Legal Action

The undesirable side effect of being a creator of digital content that is made available online is the constant worry about a few dishonest people who seek to either bring harm to your operation or profit to their pockets.

In the last 24 hours we had to contend with both. Someone illegally recording our pay-to-view content from Vimeo that we had spent easily 10,000 $ to produce and uploading it to his or her YouTube channel. We charge $ 2.95 for DanceSport enthusiasts to watch it! Other organisations charge multiples - and they don't get close to the quality that we try to guarantee with every programme that we relase. For $ 2.95!

Then we get a costume manufacturer who believes that sponsoring top couples entitles him or her to copy and repost parts of our Vimeo programmes to let people know that his, or her, products not only look good, but that they are available for purchase as well ... Give us a break!

Last but not least, we get the DJs and remixers who download our free content (and there is heaps of that available through YouTube) to underlay it with their own music creations to promote the latter. Give us a break too! Even if there is no financial loss in this specific case, we kindly ask you to leave our creations with the music that we recorded and licensed properly through our Music Partner.

Embed our videos on your website (with proper credit given) or put together playlists with our clips on your channel, no problem! But don't rip us off!

I am glad I got that off my chest! But just so you know: WDSF takes this seriously and is determined to take legal action against pirates.

Published on 7 May 2015