Monthly Archives: March 2014

Video censored *UPDATED*

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This post is not an update regarding the machine, it’s about something related to the project in a different way, maybe more important than the machine itself. It’s always great to have fun and learn while working on something you enjoy doing but it’s also important to do things for a reason once in a while, and that’s the combination of ingredients that created the OpenKnit project. To present OpenKnit I didn’t want to do just a technical video where a machine was shown, I wanted to go a bit further and talk about the implications of this technology in a more obvious way, so I created the Made In the Neighbourhood project to put some company names on the table, companies that perpetuate the status quo of the fashion industry and its model of production and consumption. I wanted to act at a local level and since I’m spanish I involved spanish clothing companies, companies international enough to scale the ideas globally, and of which two are based in my hometown, Barcelona.

After a month of the publication of the video project Vimeo sent me this email: Screen Shot 2014-03-25 at 19.41.07note: ABASIC, S.L. = Desigual

This created a bittersweet feeling in me because all the comments on the video got lost and it left many broken links in all the sites it was posted in (thanks a million for that!), but on the other hand, this tells me that I might not be doing things so wrong. I’m not sure why they did it, I guess because they saw something that they didn’t like, but this act reflects, from my point of view, on an attempt to hide something, maybe this new way of producing clothes? maybe some uncomfortable ideas that can be associated with their company?

Here you can see the new version of the video.

*UPDATE*  April 9, 2014

I spent some days looking for a lawyer to write a proper counter-notification but they are too expensive for me, so I had to cancel the idea of answering back to the DMCA takedown, fortunately, Cory Doctorow helped me to get in contact with some Vimeo staff. They told me the video was target by a DMCA takedown notice for alleged copyright infringement so they had to take it down in accordance to their DMCA policies. They looked more closely at the merits of the DMCA and after further review, Vimeo determined that the DMCA was invalid because the allegedly infringing material (mannequins bearing the DESIGUAL logo) does not fall under the protections of copyright law so, a few days later, they were able to restore the original video :)