Ironically, the film’s own trailer was uprooted and removed from Vimeo as a result of the sweep, although the trailer was uploaded from unofficial sources. An anti-piracy firm known as Entura, which was hired by Pixels’ studio Columbia Pictures, to hunt and track illegal copies of the movie appearing on streaming sites.
Late last week, Vimeo removed certain videos pursuant to a DMCA takedown notice filed by Entura worldwide claiming that the videos contained copyrighted content from the film Pixels. But on Monday afternoon, Vimeo spokesman Kevin Turner said in an e-mailed statement that the video-sharing site had restored the affected videos after several users informed them that their videos didn’t infringe on the copyright. Entura has since withdrawn its takedown notice.
As a post on TorrentFreak indicates, included in the takedown were independent videos from as far back as 2006. This shotgun approach has the (presumably) unintended effect of also pulling offline a number of legitimate videos that are either called “Pixels” or use the forbidden word somewhere in the title of the video.
UPDATE: After realizing that most of the videos pulled because of this DMCA notice had nothing to do with Adam Sandler or the movie version of Pixels, Vimeo decided to contact Entura and got this whole thing straightened out.
Take, for example, the video “Pixels – Life Buoy“, which was uploaded by Dragos Bardac.
Sorry to leave you on a downer, but it looks like Pixels, you know that awful Adam Sandler movie, is responsible for a load of unrelated videos getting taken down from the Interwebs. As Deadline reported in 2010, Columbia Pictures and Happy Madison (Adam Sandler’s company) were in talks with Jean to develop the 2015 Pixels, and Happy Madison had bought the rights. Among the other creators affected were NeMe, a non-profit group that hosted a 2006 short film called Pixels that was produced on a “shoestring budget” and “infringes no copyright”, the group told Vimeo.
According to Vimeo representatives, the company is looking into these takedowns.
