Last night, while I was sifting through my Google Reader stack for the evening, a message came from a friend across a Gmail chat channel. “Microsoft has dropped the hammer.”

“Huh?”

“… just confirmed, Machinima.com is suspended from YouTube…”

Oh my. I needed to contact some people who are “in the know” and might be able to corroborate the rumor. Immediately, I powered up Skype to flag down Moo Money… no answer. Grrr, I fired up Twitter and sent an unintentionally overcryptic message to Johnnie Ingram, hoping he might be burning some midnight oil at the Short Fuze office… nothing. I emailed Hugh Hancock, “I think something big is going down…” He was probably in bed too.

Speculation was flying fast and furious about what circumstances had led to M.com’s legal troubles. We tried visiting their site, too, and found it unavailable. Holy crap, this is bigger than we thought. It must be some kind of all-encompassing Cease & Desist order! Is this the beginning of the end of game machinima?

Then I remembered that I had a contact at a place where they’d know the truth, and might even be willing to share it with me: the Machinima.com office in Los Angeles. I called a reliable source there, and here’s the skinny:

Take Two had discovered some illegal footage from the impending Grand Theft Auto 4 was circulating around YouTube. So they issued a sweeping C & D for virtually all GTA4 content on YouTube. Machinima.com’s channel was caught in this net. However, by the time I’d called them, they had already been in touch with Take Two directly and had cleared their own involvement: the only GTA4 footage they had on their particular channel were officially released game trailers, stuff the makers of GTA4 had no issue with. Once a copyright-related suspension has taken place, however, it can take as long as a day for YouTube to restore the user and/or channel.

Machinima.com’s own website downtime appeared to be a coincidence and unrelated. Maybe their site was getting hit extra hard because their VERY popular YouTube channel was down?

How very popular, you may ask? Very, very popular.

So that’s the story. Machinima.com’s suspension from YouTube was based on a misunderstanding, and was temporary. Their YouTube channel is back up this morning. Johnnie, Sasha, Hugh, that’s why I sent out the alerts last night. Sorry to alarm you. All appears to be well for now.

Isn’t it interesting how quick some of us were to believe the crackdown theory? The legal ambiguity surrounding most game-based machinima bred that fear and paranoia. The EULA makes outlaws of us all. Will that ever change?