Party Pooper

Tweet In another blow to the sport of racing, our sport's Captain Video, known to many in the racing world as "partymanners" has had his youtube account suspended by a jealous former contributor to his channel. In June 2009, the NY Times Rail blog posted a feature on partymanners himself, Jim Conti, a 31 year old digital historian from Long Island.

The story hit the message boards over the weekend at paceadvantage.com (see thread here; h/t @robinhowlett) and erupted through the twitterverse this morning, with a unified reaction of disgust and outrage as his library with over 1,000 races and probably just as many hours of work were shut down due to a youtube copyright complaint issued by the jealous contributor.

The story according to Conti (who goes by KirisClown at paceadvantage) follows:

This is pretty much he entire story, written speedily for those interested in it..

A few years ago I started a YouTube channel to pretty much show fans races they had no way of seeing anymore. Past greats like Holy Bull, Cigar, Skip Away etc.. It steadily built up over time.. by the time it was shut down the other day it had well over 2000 race videos.. and the channel had about 5 million views.

Some time in 2008 the individual who had my channel shut down contacted me and said he had many past stakes races on video, recorded on vhs mainly from replay shows and wanted to know if Id like to add them to my channel.. Naturally i said yes..

Everything moved along smoothly until an article about me was written and appeared in the Sunday NY Times sports section.. Once this individual read it he was extremely upset that he was not written about too.. something I had no control over. The author who wrote it was interested in the story behind my channel and what motivated me to do it.. I managed to smooth things out with him though after adding a "special thank you" notice on my channel devoted to him.. so we continued...

Fast Forward a few months to September, to me receiving an email from the upset individual.. demanding that I thank him even more and show more appreciation than I've shown, or he would "pull the plug" on the whole operation.. He continued on, as if he was speaking to a naughty 5yr old.. I wouldn't have any of it and I told him he was taking the fun out of doing it and I no longer wanted to work with him.. I was not doing it for recognition where it seems that was his only intent.

Fast forward again to Thursday night and my channel being shut down.. I received notifications that he claims to own Easy Goer's race videos from Aqueduct, Belmont, Saratoga etc.. He even claims to own the video of Fusaichi Pegasus winning the Kentucky Derby, somehow he convinced YouTube that he personally owns the copyright to the races.

He apparently has worked in different areas of racing before.. but from this experience it appears he is nothing more than any enemy of the sport..

Reading further down in the thread, it appears that the fellow who shut him down is an industry vagabond who has worked at a number of different jobs and places named Jeff Mende (see last comment in the NYT post for more info).

Let's hope justice is served and his account and his library of over 1,000 races is restored for the benefit of those who enjoy watching replays.