The Daily Background
| Copyright owners now profit from infringement on YouTube
by Arlen Parsa
I got a very interesting email from YouTube today.
As long time readers may recall (although they probably don’t), my old YouTube account was suspended in September 2007 for hosting copyrighted videos– mostly videos about political stuff from television (check out my new YouTube channel here). At the time, YouTube operated on a three-strike basis for copyright violations: if you were caught doing it three times and the copyright owners complained, you would be suspended (although I’ve heard of cases where users were suspended after a single instance of posting copyrighted material; I think this happened to Alan of HPM a while back if memory serves).
When I received my first of three copyright infringement notices from YouTube I wrote a long post about how stupid copyright holders were to insist that viral videos which only ended up promoting them be removed from the site.
Well a few things have apparently changed since then, which brings me to the email I got today that I mentioned above. It seems that copyright holders can still request that videos be taken down, but now it seems they have a second option: allow the video to remain on the site and profit from it.
The email I got from YouTube said that one of my videos had been identified by the Associated Press as belonging in part or in whole to them. I don’t know if a human being who works for the AP noticed this or whether they have some automated mechanism for recognizing videos they own, but somehow they found it. And as part of YouTube’s Content Identification Program, they opted to let it remain on the site because YouTube has given them the option to post ads on the watch page it’s found on as well as monitor stats for it.
Pretty cool, huh? It’s a win-win-win situation: the AP gets advertising money, I get to keep the video on my YouTube channel and everybody else gets to keep on watching it. Hopefully other copyright owners will exercise this cool new option and profit from this type of minor copyright infringement.
Pretty cool indeed. That said, does it really help from a posting perspective since you don’t know in advance whether XYZ will opt for the ads or to give you the boot.
BTW, I believe my original account was shut down on the 2nd violation for posting a 10 second Jimmy Kimmel clip.
Ah, well I knew it was less than what their terms of service said…
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