Jan Animations C&D update - He's dead, Jan

 

TL;DW: Hasbro stalled a year and a half of JanAnimation's time by slowly talking to him about his C&D, likely in hopes that he'd lose interest. Before leaving him, Hasbro's lawyers forbade Jan from re-uploading the taken down videos and creating more videos about the show.

Full Transcript below:

The following announcement is very important. Please listen to it carefully and stick through until the end of it.
Hello, this is Jan and this is an update video on a certain matter that I already talked to you about in different occasions.
 Before I begin, here's a premise: Because of confidential reasons, I won't be able to disclose every single detail about this matter. In a similar way, I won't be able to give out names and titles that might belong to people and company departments.
I'm not making this video in order to cause any reaction, the reason why I am is because I feel that you all need and deserve to know what has been going on in the last several months. We are going to talk about my experience with Hasbro on the Cease & Desist matter.
It all started about a year and a half ago. As many of you know, I was doing fan-works back then, until I received a letter from the legal department from this company and had to stop any and all fan-productions involving said company's product and had to remove most of my videos from my Youtube Channel.
From that day on I've been exchanging e-mails with Hasbro's lawyer, which we will call 'A' and that went on for entire months, without leading anywhere except to being allowed to re-upload a few of my videos and making me keep my hopes high.
Then, one day, 'A' tells me that another person at Hasbro, from a different department than the legal one, wants to talk with me about the matter. Let's call this person 'B'.
Once again, the e-mail cycle began. Long story short, 'B' actually wanted to discuss with me on the phone which led me to think that, finally, after several months, things were starting to move in a good direction.
He basically told me that Hasbro was interested in discussing it further so things were starting to look promising in a certain way.
The plan was having a conference call with some other people. However, weeks passed and this started to look like their primary intention was stalling on me more than actually going further.
 They certainly didn't show the interest they claimed on having.
(Now here's a detail on the call I had with 'B' which is going to be important later on; he said that 'after the conference call with the other members of the company, I would have been able to reupload my fan-works. However, actually continuing them was still something to talk about.)
 So, after basically a couple of months of waiting for replies and e-mail exchanging, 'B' comes back to me with yet another contact of yet another different department of the company (let's call this person 'C'). After being presented to 'C', the person supposed to lead the conference call, this stalling continued to happen.
 No matter how much I waited or how much things seem to actually get better and/or go further, the two weeks gap between my emails and their replies was still there.
At this point I started to feel like nothing more than a hot potato being tossed around from person to person and I was cold enough to be eaten. I mean, I understand since your large, multi-national company, I am the least of your worries and priorities. I get that. But at this point of the story, it's been basically a year and I've only been asking for a clear 'yes' or 'no' answer. Why stalling so much? Why being so vague? Why not just give me an answer already?I kept on thinking 'they could have said 'no' straight away. If they didn't, they must have had something in mind' and that's what kept me hoping and fighting.
Anyway, I'm drifting away from the story, let's try to cut this short. 
After a few months of exchanging e-mails with 'C', we finally had the conference call which, by the way, has been delayed by two weeks, not once, but twice.
In this conference call I got to talk with 'C' and two more people, one of them is not relevant to the story, but we'll call the other one 'D'. 'D' represented yet another department and, from that point, on I was supposed to refer to 'D' for any and all discussions.
Anyway, what was a conference call about? I can't tell much but opportunities and ideas were discussed most importantly, I've been told that I could not continue or re-upload my fan-works (Which, if you remember, is the exact opposite of what 'B' told me a few months back into story).
Anyway, the matter was far from over, so I tried to contact 'B' again about this. At the same time, I was exchanging e-mails with 'C' and 'D' (no pun intended) until I got a reply from 'D' saying that 'C' was no longer working for the company so, for now, my only contacts were 'D', 'B' and 'A'.
Weeks passed and still no response from 'D' and since 'B' never replied to any of my e-mails after the conference call, I started contacting 'A', the lawyer, once again. Sure enough, no reply from this person either. After a few more weeks, even 'D' stopped replying and that is where I started realizing that they simply decided to ignore me. Sure enough, so it was.
It's been an another four months now and another reply is yet to arrive.
 And this pretty much covers what happened between me and this company and last year in the last year and a half. Where they just waiting for me to lose interest? If they didn't have any intention to solve this matter with me, why didn't they say 'no' straight away? Maybe the reason was that by giving a 'no' as an answer, they would've angered the fanbase again. And since they couldn't or didn't want to give me a 'yes' answer, they just kept on stalling and toss me around the company members, wasting more than a year of my life, filling me up with false hopes and lies.
 And that's it. That's all I can say and share about this experience. Needless to say, it wasn't pretty. I honestly found this way of handling this very unprofessional and even aggravating at times. I would talk more about how this whole thing made me feel but I'm not here to play the role of victim. As I said before, I'm only here to share facts with you guys, since you all need and deserve to know what's been going on.
Unfortunately, this ultimately settles the fact that I won't be able to continue any fan-works involving ponies or any other Hasbro product.
 I realize that a lot of people here were just following me for those and I will understand if you'll feel the need to unsubscribe now that I can't provide you with what you like anymore, even if it doesn't depend on me. So to everyone that will unsubscribe because of this: thanks for the ride. And to everyone that will stick around for a original projects thank you for your support. Only problem is original concepts really take a long time to develop, so you have to be patient.
Well it's really everything now. I will see you next time, but in the meanwhile I suggest you to follow me on Twitter, it's where I announce and hint to whatever I'm working on before actually releasing it.
With that being said, I wish you a nice day. Thank you for listening and see you next time.

Comments (39)

  1. Are there any links to his works? I'd like to download them and reupload them if they're taken down.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I'll just put this here https://mega.nz/#!u153CKrR!rk5wBxdjJuPBquCekJp01pb8F1GmGDPzvHz6_8nbqQQ

      Delete
  2. All in favor of doxxing Hasbro?

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  3. INB4 Poopie Scoobie and Purple Tyranny

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  4. Moral of the story: If you have the talent, make your own characters and setting.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. then no one ever sees your work.

      Delete
    2. ^This
      Pretty much a locked circle.

      Delete
  5. Hasdrones will defend this

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. muh "hasdrones" boogeyman aka people who dont eat up channers shit

      Delete
  6. What if we make better toys than Hasbro and, with the money, we buy Hasbro and finance DHX studio by ourselves?
    I think if we can do it without having Hasbro's attention, it could happen

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Hasbro is valued at $4.2 billion. Start saving!

      Delete
    2. Ask Mr Wonderful for a loan! I'm sure he'd like to get back in the toy game!
      http://cdn1.bostonmagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/oleary-main.jpg

      Delete
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    ReplyDelete
  8. Christ, Jan's an insufferable little twat. 'They dicked me around because if they said 'no' the whole fanbase would riot in my defense! Totally not playing the victim, btw!' Maybe in the grand scheme of things, Jan really wasn't that important to Hasbro one way or the other, and maybe he shouldn't have been trying to make fans and money (don't forget, Jan had partnership on youtube) off of someone else's intellectual property?

    Not to mention, they told him 'no' and he kept peppering them with emails. How important was his OC x Sweetie Belle fan cartoons to him?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Button Mash wasn't his OC, it's a character from the show. Jan only made him "famous", but he didn't created him.

      Delete
    2. Right, so him making fan animations and work and making money off of it is sooooo much different than the gajillion other artists in this fandom doing the exact same thing, and this makes him a twat...
      Ok.

      No, wait, it was the part where he kept pestering them with emails after they promptly and unequivocally said "no... BUT WAIT! We'll let you continue... but no... BUT WE'D BE INTERESTED IN WORKING WITH YOU..." *cue the crickets*
      And he hung in there for a year and a half, not making anymore fan animations, waiting for emails from people who assured him they were interested... and he's the twatwaffle for this.

      LOGIC

      Delete
    3. What makes Jan so special that a C&D doesn't mean a C&D, many other high quality artists and content providers got shut down. Did they mope or try and argue against the impossible like Jan did? Nope mist either moved on, changed their name to carry on or in Mane 6's case, made a new IP of their own creation.

      Have no sympathy that he spent a year and a half chasing what was obviously a lost cause.

      Delete
    4. glad I'm not the only one who noticed what a 'tard Jan is. rest in piss

      Delete
  9. Same goes for:
    - MLP Online (mlpfimonline.deviantart.com)
    - Fighting is Magic

    ReplyDelete
  10. I saw this shit coming a mile away I mean Hasbro is a multimillion dollar corporation and were just the peasants meant to suck their cocks and buy their shit

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  11. PURPLE TYRANNY

    P
    U
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    P
    L
    E

    T
    Y
    R
    A
    N
    N
    Y

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  12. Joke's on you. Hasbro. With this happened, your goodwill will drain, and sympathy for JA will grow.

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  13. So, does this happen to have something to do with using the DHX assets?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Nope.
      The case here was simply that Jan did such a good job that Hasbro had to tell him to stop or idiots would think his stuff is actually their stuff, so copyright bullshit ensued.

      Delete
  14. In a perfect world, Hasbro would hire Jan to make a spin-off series, but as Dr. Wolf said, they might not trust a third-party to represent their company.
    It's a shame, Jan is really talented.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. That mktoon guy might have been the driving force in having that be a possibility, as he was a higher up guy at Hasbro that was a big fan.

      But he left, and with him gone that might be where hope straight-up died for Jan.

      Delete
  15. he could have easily contested this but he didn't want to get black listed, notice how no other guy had any issues - the simple fact is he can't make pony videos and not get blacklisted if he contests fair use.

    ReplyDelete
  16. Hasbro had to do what it did: this could become a messy IP battle if the company didn't do anything about this.

    Reposting from /mlp/
    https://archive.is/2TyOa#selection-6197.0-6197.42

    I make a huge amount of fan content myself, but it's a fic series. One of the differences is, it's intentionally sexed up and twisted.

    That serves two purposes. One, I like it that way, but two, there's no chance anybody anywhere would conclude my stuff was some kind of Official MLP Content.

    Jan's problem was not only that his show-accurate style got very close to what the DHX team was able to do: it's that he was using show IP (not 'assets' in the flash sense, but assets in the sense of designed characters that could be further developed) and developing it in ways that COULD also serve Hasbro. Publically.

    That meant there was a risk at some future time, of Jan and Hasbro getting in a legal fight over who owned Button Mash, for instance. If Jan developed the character with his own resources and won a court case on the grounds that the pre-Jan cameo wasn't enough to confer ownership, especially if the name Button Mash wasn't Hasbro but a fan name, they could end up forced to negotiate licensing for their own character. It depends on whether Jan got enough money for legal representation (in 2015, that's a danger: crowdfunding) and whether he was able to persuade a judge or jury, which isn't up to Hasbro.

    They had to do what they did: he's just foolish for letting them burn his time, well played Hasbro legal team. But they had no choice, things could have got real ugly for them.

    You don't see anybody C&Ding say, NiggerFaggot, and he's every bit as show-accurate in style. But nobody would ever, ever mistake his work for official Hasbro work, so there's no reason they would even try to draw attention to him.
    You could do completely heinous show-accurate animations and be C&D free. It's trying to play in Hasbro's sandbox and NOT be creepy that will get you blasted.

    ReplyDelete
  17. You know I told him over a year ago.

    "dude.... this is what happens to animators... Look man button mash had a good run. Button Mash did it's job and got you your fan base. Now you can roll out your original content and not worry about C&D stuff. You're a good writer, you'll come up with characters people love."

    He was NOT happy to hear this. Proceeded to lecture me... on something... I forget exactly what, I was too shocked to find out he actually wanted to animate like the show. I legit thought it was just a long term ploy to get sub counts.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I never mentioned it to him again. I know it's a tough pill to swallow to let go of something you poured your heart and soul into. (like 1000+ hours of labor) but im glad he made the decision. Hopefully his next thoughts are "nah, fuck button mash and ponies. my next cartoon will be even better!!! yes!!"

      Delete
    2. Surprised to see a post where you're not going POOPIE SCOOBIE on us

      Delete
  18. Jan I'm here for you and that sucks I think you actually can still do pony videos just original pony videos.

    ReplyDelete

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