Whodunit?

There has been some public controversy during the last few days over the circumstances surrounding the disappearance from Vlad Tepes’ Vimeo channel of all the subtitled videos of Col. Allen West.

People have continued sending us questions by email as well as leaving them in the comments. To clarify matters, I’ll give a full account of what happened. The report below consists entirely of facts, with neither speculation nor opinions. If there are no further developments, this will be my final word on the topic.

The incident began on April 22 when Vlad’s entire Vimeo channel was dropped. Several days later, after Vlad requested more information, Vimeo supplied a list of the videos that caused the problem, and all of them were the Rosetta Stone subtitled versions of Col. West’s speech, for which someone had claimed copyright or ownership.

After I posted about what happened, the videographer who taped the speech contacted us by email. Her name is Pamela Hall, and her excellent work is blogged at the Vigilant Squirrel Brigade. Ms. Hall insisted that she did not contact Vimeo to claim copyright nor ask them to take down any of Vlad’s videos of Col. West. The only video that she objected to had been posted on Vlad’s Youtube channel, and featured Col. West’s speech subtitled in English — which for some incomprehensible reason went viral a couple of weeks ago and garnered upwards of a million views before it was removed. In response to her complaint, Youtube took that video down.

However, Ms. Hall emphatically asserts that she had nothing to do with any videos of Col. West that were taken down from Vlad’s Vimeo channel.

The organizers of the Freedom Defense Initiative, Robert Spencer and Pamela Geller, have now also publicly insisted that they had nothing to do with Vimeo’s decision to take down any of the subtitled Col. West videos.

So we are left with a single question:
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If the videographer and the FDI organizers did not claim copyright and ask Vimeo to remove the subtitled videos of Col. West’s speech, then who did?


Whodunit?


Update:On the advice of two experts (one of them my wife), I have revised my spelling of “whodunit” to reflect customary usage. I yield to higher authority.