Some of you may have noticed that my MemoryEffects.PDF document was missing last week. It went on a bit of an adventure.

Recently, over at the home offices of Wonder Wizards (Kenton Knepper's magic business), they received several notices of illegal copies of their works being posted on Scribd.com. The people hired by Wonder Wizards to protect their copyright combed through Scribd.com, found several documents that violated the copyright. Unfortunately, my MemoryEffects document was caught up in this search, due to the following entry:

“Any Card at Any Number” - The performer invites two spectators on stage, one to act as a psychic, and the other to act as a referee. A blue deck and a red deck are both shown to be complete and well-mixed, then the blue deck is returned to its case. The red deck is then mixed further, and then a card and number are chosen by the acting psychic. The acting referee then removes the blue deck from the case themselves, counting to the chosen number, which proves to be the chosen card, “Sorcerer Series #2”, Kenton Knepper (Trick by Newell Unfried)

The document was removed, and a notice was posted in its place stating that it was removed due to the violation of Wonder Wizards' copyright. I was confused at first, as I knew that simply describing a trick wasn't a copyright violation, nor was I linking to any illegitimate copies. I decided to have fun with this, as I still had the copy hosted on my servers, and brought it up on a couple of magic forums, titling the posts The Document Kenton Knepper Doesn't Want You To See!

I learned from these forums that Kenton hadn't seen the document itself, and that it was described to him as an ad for a book I was apparently promoting, that included all the routines on that list. I'm guessing the people who were doing the search didn't look too closely at the document, either, as they would've had to believe that this was a 65-page ad for this supposed book.

After receiving several e-mails about this one takedown from people who had read my forum posts, Kenton e-mailed me, and graciously apologized for the mistaken takedown. Yesterday, we cleared the matter up between us, and he helped me contact Scribd's copyright dept. to correct the mistake. MemoryEffects was back up on Scribd by late Saturday night.

I also figured that this was a good a time as any to update the document, so there are a few new entries! For those not already familiar with MemoryEffects, it's a bibliography of where to find routines related to memory, including not only memory demonstrations and magic tricks that secretly use memory techniques, but also books and articles on memory, and even pseudo-memory demonstrations. You can even take a quick peek at it right here on the blog (The full size version of the document at the previous link may be easier to read).