You make a video, and you put it on YouTube for people to enjoy and then one day you are looking through the place and discover that your videos have been tinkered with and those tinkered with versions have been posted online without your permission.

This recently happened to Potemkin Pictures and below is Randall’s telling of what happened.

‘Someone recently posted one of our films with a new “improved” soundtrack. We asked them not to do it again and had them take it down. A few weeks later, the same person did it again with a different film, and we made it perfectly clear that it was not appreciated and not do it again and to take down the video, which they did.

‘War Targ’ was one of the tinkered with fan films.

This weekend, they did it with “War Targ.” We did not ask it to be removed. We filed a claim with YouTube citing a violation of our rights, and YouTube acted swiftly, removing the offending “improved” video within four hours of our complaint. The person informed us he was only “trying to help” while telling others we were just “embarrassed” by how “much better” his version was. The individual has been blocked. YouTube has removed the offending video and given his “channel” a strike.

If anyone comes across any of our videos being misappropriated by any other individual, please do not hesitate to reach out to us at potemkin1711@gmail.com or producer@potemkinpictures.com with a link to the video and channel so that we may again take swift action.

Incidents like this does happen from time to time on the internet, videos do get taken by people who either make changes to it and upload it, or they just upload the original version for some reason, perhaps to get unsuspecting people.

Some steal videos of people doing good deeds or making appeals for help to steal the attention and siphon off any donations that people want to give to the legitimate owner of the video.

Not sure about these days but there was a thriving online availability of re-edits of movies, people would do things like remove the romance scenes from Pearl Harbour or in the case of Superman IV they put deleted scenes back into the film and even Star Wars Episode IV had a few cuts trying to make it like the original 1977 release, no doubt that this annoys/annoyed movie studios.

Permission to tinker with a fan film should always be sought after first, if permission is not given then leave it alone.