After Disney's Paperman received an Oscar nomination for Best Animated Short last month, the company released it in full on YouTube, an internet-savvy move that garnered widespread attention for the film and inspired the rest of the nominees (save Fresh Guacamole, which had been online since last March) to follow suit. Don't go looking for them now, though. All five of the officially released videos have been taken offline after a letter sent to the nominees by the chief executive of Shorts International, which complained that continued streaming would cause "significant, if not irreparable damage" to their current theatrical release.

The February 14 letter from Shorts International chief executive Carter Pilcher, which leaked online at Deadline, noted that the distributor was "receiving a very significant, adverse reaction from the independent theaters that are playing the films" as a result of their online availability.

"Unlike Webbies or Ani's, the Academy Award is designed to award excellence in the making of motion pictures that receive a cinematic release, not an online release," Pilcher wrote, going on to argue that "this release of the films on the Internet threatens to destroy 8 years of audience growth and the notion that these film gems are indeed movies – no feature length film would consider a free online release as a marketing tool!"

Noting that releasing the shorts online helps attracts "buzz," Pilcher suggested that such things are unnecessary when it comes to winning the award itself: "The fact that all the films were put online is perplexing as Academy voters have other and better means of viewing the films, including through the Academy-provided DVDs of all the Live Action and Animated short film nominees sent to all voting members."

Instead, he "humbly" requested that the movies be removed from the internet by February 19 at the latest. As of writing, all of the movies have indeed been removed from YouTube, and no theaters have pulled the big-screen showings of the five nominees, which are still playing across the U.S. (Shorts International did not respond to a request for comment for this story.)

It's unclear what to make of this development; on the one hand, it's hard to fault the animators or their studios for bowing to the potential threat this posed to whatever small profit their shorts could receive from a theater run. Sure, Paperman and Maggie Simpson may be the work of multi-national corporations, but Adam & Dog, Fresh Guacamole and Head Over Heels were all independent productions unlikely to get a higher-profile release in theaters. On the other hand, the idea that free online promotional release was barred by commercial concerns is somewhat hard to stomach.

There are, obviously, ways of addressing this problem in the future: Move up the limited theatrical release so that there is a period when the shorts are only available in theaters before an online release, or perhaps include additional content in the theatrical release that isn't available online. That wouldn't deprive the majority of viewers the chance to actually see the shorts ahead of the awards ceremony. It's simply a shame that it couldn't have been worked out ahead of time.