Brony Musician Cyrricky Resurrected as DMCA-Slinging Shark Girl

In this waking life, there are three things you can count on: death, taxes, and Brony musicians being complete shitheads.

This week, we've had our fair share of dickery, and it all starts with Cyrricky.

In every way except physical, I am a shark.

You probably don't remember Cyrricky as one of the contributing musicians to 2012's Balloon Party album "100% No Feeble Cheering", with the song "Party Pony". He also released some pony music on his own.

Well, you won't believe what he's done!

If you guessed "left the fandom angrily, set up a gender-swapped sharksona Twitter profile, then set out to fuck with the fandom", you're insanely right.

I wish everyone was this honest.

Cyrricky, now a plucky girl-shark named "Shark Theme Park", has decided that all of the music they released in the pony fandom wasn't actually ours to play in the first place, and rather than politely ask that the songs be removed, they instead sent out a wave of DMCA takedown notices to anyone who uploaded it on YouTube or played it on the radio, even going after DJs who included the music in their sets.

For those of you unfamiliar with YouTube's handling of DMCA takedown notices, essentially they just take a huge shit in your Cheerios. After just a single copyright "strike" (which follows a "guilty until proven innocent" appeals process), you're prevented from making videos longer than 15 minutes, unlisted/private videos, streaming live or adding external annotations.

To a lot of YouTube users, this means you're completely fucked. And Cyrr--SharkThemePark thinks this is just hilarious.

"HaHA! If I can't be horse famous, I'll take you all down with me!"

There's just one problem: Cyrricky doesn't own the rights to their submission in Balloon Party. The entire BP album series is licensed under a very permissive Creative Commons license, that allows remixing, sharing and copying, as long as the purposes are non-commercial.

Cyrricky never signed anything saying that, though. Granted, they didn't have to; after all, they submitted their music to the album knowing exactly where it was going. But with logic like that, how could anyone sit and watch the fandom burn?

"Show me where, in writing, it says I'm a cunt."

Currently, YouTubers across the fandom are busy appealing the DMCA copyright strikes sent out by the salty shark, with some having limited success and others finding their accounts penalized until at least November. Even in the (seemingly arbitrary) case where SharkThemePark has issued a retraction of the takedown, the restrictions will take at least 2 weeks to be lifted, because DMCA takedowns are automated and immediate, while retractions require manual human review.

Make no mistake, the system's prone to abuse. What seems to prevent this abuse is artists knowing the kind of damage that this kind of mistreatment of their fans would cause to their reputation. After all, no self-respecting musician who really cared about their image would ever punish fans for playing music they were allowed to play, and...

...oh. So they just don't care.

Moments like this are just harsh reminders that the entire Brony music community is based on the fragile assumption that everyone's not going to be total cunts to one another. Once someone breaks this unspoken rule, things get bad fast.

A word of advice to Cyrricky, though: if infringement isn't your thing, maybe this shouldn't be one of your album covers:

The original, by Skrillex