These Tweets probably did them in on 2+2:



You can't talk to Mason Malmuth like that and expect to ever be able to work with 2+2 again. He or others may point to their actions but 2+2 has historically put up with epic amounts of shadiness and scumbaggery from advertisers, as long as they pay their bills - and as long as they don't piss Mason off.

it is the legal way... he is doing the friendly non threatening way..

Two Plus Two dropped Lock, Ultimate Bet, LV Sands Corp while they were paying their bills. Same can't be said for many others in the industry.

You waited a long time for UB and Lock. A long, long time. Longer than many users wanted you to wait.

LV Sands I'm assuming was ideological, i.e. pissing off Mason. Which proves my point.

This.

Cardplayer are/were a disgrace

We dropped Lock's advertising long before closing the forum. That was kept open a long time in the best interest of our members to maintain contact with lock. We were the first major site to drop UB.

Are you here on 2+2 just to troll us or are you truely this uninformed?

To be fair, and I'm no great Mason fanboy, but 2+2 waited until they had enough evidence to justify rejecting them.
There's so many false rumours on here that it makes sense for them to be cautious.

Are you sure they were real pirates and not just people who agreed with you but were being sarcastic?

I'll try to say this in the most respectful and nicest way possible but I don't think your words on this can be taken fully at face value, given your position as a representative of 2+2. However, I will acknowledge I do have only somewhat limited knowledge of the timeframe, specifics etc involving when UB, Lock and others were taken down. Thus, my original wording was pretty harsh and specific when I should have qualified it more and said something like 'I may be mistaken, but...'.

All of that said, I believe there is truth in what I said. If others know the details better, hopefully they'll chime in.

Well, back then we didn't rely on rolleyes to detect sarcasm, but the fines kept is sweet(ish)

1. 2+2 never took ads from Ultimate Bet.

2. Affiliate sites that purchased advertising sometimes had UB in their advertising and we would ask them not to run those anymore once we saw them and understood the issues with UB.

3. The UB problems were completely exposed on 2+2 and not at other places (some of who continued to run UB ads until it was closed down).

4. You have been linked to other accounts that were already banned, so enjoy your vacation.

Mason

As someone who followed the Lock saga, I was very surprised that MM continued to run banner ads for them LONG after it was completely obvious that they were not planning to pay their customers. Really I was shocked and simply concluded that Mason's bank account was more important to him than the well being of the poker community. Now MB gets banned for an innocuous post which has apparently ruffled MM's feathers.

Mason-please tell us the date on which the Lock banner was pulled. We can then go back through the posts of the Lock saga and decide for ourselves whether you should have pulled it earlier. To me, and I'm sure many others, it was obvious many months earlier that Lock was scamming their customers. Was no one in 2 + 2 management following the various Lock threads? If there was a legitimate reason for you to have waited, let's hear it. The way it looks to me, you helped facilitate Lock stealing money from your readers.

I am not trolling you, and defended you in the Dutch Boyd thread. Could you please respond? Or am I now banned also?

If I correctly understand what MM has written, MB was already banned under another account and attempted to get around it by starting the MB account. He has now been discovered.

I have been able to annoy, disagree and argue with all kinds of people, including MM's business partner David Sklansky, without ever getting a single infraction on here, so I don't think the moderation in NVG is unnecessarily harsh at all.

Why was he just now discovered after 1265 posts?

Irregardless of that, I would love it if MM would address the main point of my post, which is about the Lock banner ad remaining up for so long after it was obvious that they were a bad actor.

You gonna get the ban hammer!

[] on topic thread
[] 2+2 staff and owners enjoy being scrutinized by their user base

4/4/2013:

(Emphasis added).


Pay special attention to the non-answer regarding ESPN, G4, NBC and the justification (bolded below) for hosting/rebroadcasting content they don't have permission to use:

I have (or had... that ship has sailed) money on Lock and kept a very close eye on the developments throughout 2013, and I think 2+2 handled the situation pretty well.

It isn't just videos either. I have had my own issues with this company scraping my news articles and presenting them as its own under a different author name. I wrote an article about this a couple of weeks ago on my blog.

You Tube allows those that own copyrights a variety of options. Here is some info about You Tube's Content ID.

If you try to upload a video that has already been reported, You Tube will block it or move it automatically to the owner of the content's account. Their system is good at detecting previously reported content, even if the content has been altered or music added to an otherwise unique video. Users that upload copyrighted work are warned and future instances can get them banned.

I don't think Pokertube provides any of the above services.

You Tube does not advertise on random videos that people upload where it cannot verify copyright. You Tube also does not add their logo/watermark to videos of unknown origin.

I believe Pokertube adds its full logo to the start of every video and adds a logo to the upper left of it for its entirety. Producers feel that this makes it appear as if Pokertube was the creator of the content. Also, every video at Pokertube in my test had a banner ad above the player.

Pokertube compares themselves to You Tube when they get criticized, but there is a big difference between the two sites in the eyes of the creators of the content.

The same people that are unhappy about Pokertube showing the videos have resolved their issues at You Tube by either having the videos blocked permanently or monetizing them if another user uploads them. In many cases, the content owner uploads these videos directly to their channel for the sole purpose of monetization.

I don't believe Pokertube has any system that makes this possible. If they do, I can't find it on their site. Last summer, when I wrote an article about this very same topic, no such program existed.

Does Pokernews copyright still apply to clips being used for satire purposes? Figure you'd be the best person to ask about this

If you would have followed the Lock discussion on here you would already know the answer to your question. And I suspect that's the case.

MM

Most of the offending videos are uploaded by a single user named RPFC. He seems to work around the clock ripping videos and uploading them to PokerTube.

I'm sure he's just a very dedicated hobbyist with no affiliation to PT. Slight oversight on their part not banning him all these years.

There is such a thing as "fair use" with satire and making significant alterations. Of course, if PokerNews had any problem with Howard Lederer Confesses Everything, I would probably take it down. They've never contacted me about it.

Satire/parody typically falls under fair use. These uses do not compete with or supplant the market for the original work.

Hi All,

My name is Jamie and I am the person mentioned in this thread. I am ultimately responsible for all 180Vita brands.

Personally, I do not care much for 'the industry' and the self gratification that goes along with it. When businesses focus too much on award ceremonies, making friends with others in the same business and so forth, they lose sight of what is really important - The customer. I am not sure if readers here are familiar with the phrase 'Circle Jerk', but this is unfortunately what the poker industry has turned into.

I do not have much time right now, but would like to address a few key points:

1. 2+2 - We decided we no longer wished to work with 2+2. Not the other way around. They have attacked us on numerous occasions without any attempt to reach out or have a conversation. In my opinion this is unprofessional and not the kind of business we wish to pay money to. By all means they are entitled to hold their own opinions, but being attacked by a business who you have paid over 6 figures to, without a friendly phone call or email, is odd to say the least.

Of course 2+2 is poker's 2nd strongest community to Pokerstrategy, but I would also encourage all members who hold it in such high regard to ask: Where does all the money go? Certainly, not as much of it is re-invested into growing poker as it should be. I don't say this to attack the forum, but to highlight that nobody is perfect.


2. Copyright Law - As another posted pointed out, copyright is governed by the DMCA. As a company, we are pretty much online 24/7, but instead of emailing us and going through the correct motions, some of our competitors prefer to do it in public, without specifying the infringing material or following the correct process. Whilst we are not legally obliged to respond to such requests, we often do and despite what many believe, genuinely do our best to ensure infringing content does not re-appear.

Some competitors will imply that we do not respond to takedown requests - This is simply not true. We are very responsive and in reality do not receive many requests. Probably around 7 or 8 in the last 12 months. Always consider the source of these statements and ask for evidence.

Nobody posting in this thread can truthfully state they have found us to be unresponsive when emailing about such issues. In fact, multiple parties had agreements with us before and gave explicit permission for content to be posted. Later requesting for it to be removed. PokerNews or SrslySrius are not instances of us randomly posting their content without permission - there were actual discussions and later they asked for their videos to be removed, and we obliged every time.

Compared to most 'Tube' sites we are incredibly vigilant.


3. Bad Logic - You cannot ask for content to be taken down that you do not own. Many of our competitors willfully refuse to understand this. A society where I could enforce trespass on land I do not own, or request for content to be taken down that is nothing to do with me, would be anarchy. What's more, how does Mason or anyone else for that matter know which content we have explicit permission for? They do not. We follow legal process and if any of our competitors believe we do not, they are welcome to band together to file a class action.

The reason they are resorting to these attacks is because they know we are not behaving unlawfully and this is their only option.


4. PokerNews - Some back story needs to be given here because PokerNews are misleading you, by not offering the full facts of the situation.

* Around 16 months ago we partnered with PokerNews and they asked us to showcase PokerNews videos on PokerTube.
* They did not get the results PokerNews had hoped for and they asked us to remove all videos.
* We did our best to remove the videos, but we did miss some. Probably 100 out of 2,500.
* Over the next couple of months PokerNews would email us from time to time. Never specifying the videos that were infringing, but with vague statements like 'Remove all PokerNews videos'. Each time we sought confirmation that they were happy with what we were removing and they acknowledged this.
* Most of their emails were coupled with a barrage of Tweets, always from the same group of people. Never specifying the infringing content.
* Additionally, we have received emails from PokerNews stating they have reported PokerTube to Google to attempt to get the site blacklisted. Poker advocates indeed and of course their attempts failed.

Keep in mind, this all started with an agreement that PokerTube would host their content and then a matter of months later they were attempting to use the very same content as a means to significantly damage our business.

Finally, I would like to invite PokerNews to email me personally an exhaustive list of remaining infringing content. It will be seen to within 24 hours and I can personally confirm that no new PokerNews content has been published to PokerTube for several months. Email - Jamie@PokerVIP.com & Hello@PokerTube.com

Question for Mr Parvis (AKA: The pitbull): Were you aware of the above details and communication between 180Vita and iBusmedia?



5. Motivation - We must consider why the fact PokerTube shows High Stakes Poker, upsets Mason, PokerNews and others so much. It surely cannot be damaging to poker? HighStakesPoker is on torrents, YouTube and many other sites - The only difference with PokerTube is that there are no adverts on the videos (absolutely none) and the videos are nicely curated.

In my personal opinion this is evidence of an agenda and a very sad one for poker. Why are these people so hell bent on service no longer being available for poker players and enthusiasts? They do not own High Stakes Poker, we can demonstrate we do not make money from it, so what remains? If they are crusaders vs copyright, there are far more productive ways to fight this cause.

Consider, that Bluff are dying and cannot adapt, 2+2 are getting squeezed by Stars and PokerNews have recently pulled out of doing official WSOP coverage. The 'industry' is no longer booming and if these businesses are not going to thrive, they will do their best to make sure as hell nobody else does - No amount of industry awards and circle jerking will change the reality of what is happening to your business guys.

Competitors - Why does it upset you so much to see HighStakesPoker on PokerTube? Let's get down to the crux of the issue.


6. Video Page - I would invite anyone who is still interested in this 'debate', to go to PokerTube and view a video. There are no adverts.


7. Value - I genuinely believe that PokerTube offers exposure to small video producers. A couple of days ago we received an email from a gentleman named Mark Hoke who does a video podcast. He wanted a discussion about his content, but did not request to take it down - I am still awaiting his reply.

Anyway, I researched his show a bit and found that his YouTube channel had very few views, maybe 10 views per video. Now, our competitors would argue that we are hi-jacking his content, but the opposite is true.

If you search 'Mark Hoke' or any associated keywords, PokerTube is usually on the second page, so there is no way we are taking away his organic viewers and re-directing them to PokerTube. The reason the show gets views with us, is because we are posting it on our social media, putting it out in newsletters and actually getting behind it because we think it's great. We are demonstrably giving the show exposure and it deserves it. I would be happy to discuss this in more detail, as I think there is a lot of bad logic being banded about by competitors here.

Of course it will be Mark's decision (not ours and not any of our competitors') whether he wishes the videos to remain on PokerTube. Either way, we will respect his wishes.

---

Cliffs:

* Some companies in poker are getting squeezed.
* Instead of improving their own business, many think the answer to their problems is in attacking others.
* There is no legal basis for these attacks. If our competitors believe there is, they know where we are.
* On a personal level, if you are an impartial reader, you are seeing some people with not enough to do on a Friday night.

My business genuinely re-invests money into poker. There are no multi-millionaires here, and I think the quality of our sites and service demonstrate this. We recently bought and re-developed WeakTight for example, which is a key tool for online poker players. We do this because we love poker. Personally, I am excited by ways we can use technology to improve the game. Soon, you will be able to share poker hands directly to Twitter for example, check this out.

I am not perfect and as a business we have made a few slips - For example, we did have rogue freelancers who plagiarised a handful of news articles and this was a mistake I cannot apologise enough for. However, on the whole I am confident we are good for poker and I hope to continue to serve real poker players and enthusiasts for the rest of my life.


Yours respectfully,

Jamie