It's one of those bizarre Internet culture triumphs that is completely random yet somehow ingenious: An Instagram user began posting the original "Star Wars" in 15-second clips, nearly finishing the movie before his account was closed.
Scot Pansing, of San Francisco, started the "Starwarsmovie" account and began posting the "Episode IV: A New Hope" piecemeal earlier this month, cleverly uploading clips in reverse order so that viewers of the page would eventually see the clips stacked from beginning to end.
Why? He just felt like it. Pansing noted on the Twitter account accompanying his Instagram feed: "Just thought about it one day driving to work and started that night." No fancy video equipment required — he just pointed his phone at the screen and uploaded as he went.
But apparently Instagram,which only recently started letting users add video clips, didn't take kindly to this particular use of its service. Pansing told NBC News that "within hours of the media coverage, Instagram just disabled the account... they probably wanted to shut it down before a phone call from the content owner(s)." Indeed, uploading copyrighted content is frowned upon, though Instagram doesn't use an automatic copyright-detection tool like YouTube does.
"Of course it was always a violation [of Instagram's terms of service]," Pansing tweeted. But with only 11 minutes left of the film to upload, it was very nearly a completed task when the account was finally shut down.
So what's his next late-night project? "For my next trick, I'll be tweeting the entire script 144 characters at a time!" (He adds he's just kidding, of course.)
— via Gizmodo
Devin Coldewey is a contributing writer for NBC News Digital. His personal website is coldewey.cc.