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April Fools: An Unfortunate Turn of Events

sad faceIn what has been a weird week for us here at SmoothFewFilms, I regret to inform you guys that we’ve got some bad news. Throughout our years as content creators on the Internet, we’ve always worked to deliver quality comedy material. Sometimes, this included legally gray areas such as machinima, where we utilized someone else’s intellectual property for a laugh, or in the case of The Leet World, an entire series.

Regretfully, we have finally pushed things too far. Due to our parody of an “Avatar parody”, Fox has sent us an actual cease and desist letter. It wasn’t just the Avatar parody that lead to this, but also the suggestion that Fox would send us a cease and desist letter in Web Zeroes Episode 14 that lead to the actual cease and desist letter. I know, it’s both terribly confusing as well as ironic, but this is sadly not a laughing matter for us.

A few things are changing. Over the next couple of weeks, we’ll have to remove Episode 14 of Web Zeroes, as well as any other outstanding works on our site that use other intellectual property. No we’re not yet in trouble for those, but this is what our legal counsel has recommended for us to do. This will include our Halo shorts, Day in the Life of a Turret, Leet World, and any episodes of Web Zeroes which use even images or brief shots of video games, which is quite a fair bit.

Sorry to have to tell you guys this, it bums us out just as much as it will you, if not more so. We’re not really sure where to go from here, because this is admittedly disheartening. It seems not even our live action endeavors kept us out of legal trouble. Maybe next we’ll work on stick figures or something, but who knows. We could always just send carrier pigeons straight to our fans because the Internet is a big and scary place.

Anyway, if you want to review the actual cease and desist letter, the link is right here. Maybe you guys can help us out.

Update: Yes, this is an April Fool’s Joke.