Patreon dumps vids on Vimeo, passes fees through to unsuspecting users
It seems that unbeknownst to most of its users, since Patreon has allowed creators to post videos they have been dumping those videos on 'pro' level Vimeo accounts rather than hosting the content themselves (as any self-respecting publisher would do).
When Vimeo came calling to look for the payment for excess bandwidth that particularly popular creators used, Patreon just passed the invoice right on through to the content creators, some of whom have been notified that they have a week to pay Vimeo thousands of dollars or have all of their content deleted.
https://twitter.com/hate5six/status/1481500463317012482?s=21
https://www.patreon.com/posts/vimeo-is-holding-61514364 Your first link has nothing to do with Patreon. The second one also doesn't support the "unbeknownst to most of its users", given that they got a vimeo subscription so they could use the feature to upload to Vimeo through Patreon. Patreons documentation is quite clear on that, and you can't use it without setting up and linking a Vimeo account... It's not really surprising Patreon isn't footing the bill for a "upload your videos to vimeo" feature. So this seems to be basically entirely on Vimeo, except for Patreon not offering their own video solution. Thanks for the detail, as we know people exaggerate on social media and it wasn't clear from the few posts I could find about it whether this was an opt-in or not. The first post has a mention further down in the tweet thread about that particular creator also getting a ~$3000.00 invoice from Vimeo. https://twitter.com/hate5six/status/1481511608979533826?s=21 Patreon needs to be a publisher or be a payment processor, but don't charge people for both while only actually doing one or the other. I suspect a lot of content people have paid for is going to start disappearing next week, it seems that these guys got one-week notices to pay up to Vimeo. It will be interesting to see what Patreon does then, because your analysis is mistaken in that their hands are not clean here. All the EULAs in the world don't absolve them from charging for a service and then failing to deliver it. By refusing to publish the videos themselves, if Vimeo pulls any of the content down Patreon has opened themselves up for a class action, I would think. The end user subscriber does not have a reason to care about Patreon's subcontracting status, all they would need to know is they paid for content and it did not arrive. Patreon isn't subcontracting hosting, the hosting customer of vimeo is clearly the creators and not Patreon. Patreon is as far as I can tell still doing their obligations: collect money, host feeds of posts. That these posts contain references to videos that creators uploaded to vimeo and that have now been taken down is not (legally) their problem. If Patreon had used Vimeo as a video backend and didn't pay them, that would a problem. But Patreon has very clearly not done that, but merely made it easier for creators to use vimeo videos from the creators accounts in posts. Patreon has no obligation to the subscribers to still provide content that the creator has failed to still make available. That the end-users didn't know how videos end of on the platform doesn't magically create an obligation for Patreon. Creators might have a better shot if Patreon in any way misled or provided bad information, but from what little I've publicly seen even that seems unlikely. Overall situation sucks quite a bit. Patreon IS VERY MUCH subcontracting hosting, and quite nefariously at that. If Patreon is charging users for access to content, Patreon is obligated to serve it to those users, which in turn means Patreon is obligated to provide the hosting. Content creators on Patreon aren't users, they are content creators. The end user is the user. The end user is the one paying the money here. If Patreon wants to, in turn, bill content creators for that hosting that's between them and the content creators, but the end user has absolutely ZERO reason to care whether Joe Schmo YouTube influencer paid his video hosting bill. If I am a user and I've paid for content on Patreon which disappears, my legal recourse is with Patreon, not the content creator. I didn't pay the content creator, Patreon took my money and if the videos aren't there, Patreon has failed to provide the service for which the money was paid. Whether or not the content creator has a claim against Vimeo or Patreon is immaterial to this. This isn't rocket science, I don't know why you are struggling to figure it out. Replace "Patreon" with "Netflix". Imagine Netflix's customers paying for access to their movies and TV shows, but Netflix decides that movie producers have to pay for the hosting because they don't like the size of their AWS bills. When the movies disappear because the movie producers don't like the size of the AWS bill either, do you think Netflix would get away with keeping the money but telling their own end user "oh sorry the movie producer was supposed to pay the AWS bill for their film's downloads, but they didn't pay the hosting bill so it disappeared, not my problem." Or if you prefer, replace "Patreon" with "Cambridge University Press." Imagine you bought a book from said book publisher's website, and it never arrives in the mail. When you inquire about where your book is, Cambridge University Press says "oh yeah we have rights to print and distribute that book, but printing presses cost a lot so we told the book author to just print them himself. If he didn't pay for the printing and send it to you, that's not our problem, piss off." Obviously these are ridiculous scenarios, and would land Netflix and/or Cambridge University Press in their attorneys' offices to take a look at the claims filed against them bright and early tomorrow morning if they tried to do such things. >we haven’t uploaded a single Channel 5 video directly to Vimeo, we've only uploaded through Patreon’s built-in video feature, so I was confused. >n addition to that, we actually purchased a ‘Vimeo Pro’ plan in advance, which costs $250/year and supposedly allows us 1 Terabyte of annual storage. Somethings not adding up here. Why would they purchase a Vimeo Pro plan if they were confused about where their videos were hosted? Indeed. I can deduce from that statement that Patreon probably allows content creators to post to the Vimeo upload API, but all of this is smells incredibly sketchy.