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YouTube's Unspoken Linking Policy For Copyright Infringers

Posted by timothy on Wednesday May 14, @05:45PM
from the doesn't-seem-unreasonable-from-here dept.
Google Music
Hackajar writes "Valleywag has an interesting post detailing YouTube's new way to deal with copyrighted music videos, removing embed tags and linking it to the official content on site. What's significant here is the lack of video removal by YouTube staff. From the post, "Uploads of music videos from the band by non-official sources now carry a link reading "Contains content from [insert studio here]"". They use a Modest Mouse music video from a third party to illustrate the new change."

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Firehose:YouTube's unspoken policy for copyright infringers by Anonymous Coward
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  • Perhaps the link only shows up if you're using the new YouTube Beta?

  • YouTube's unspoken policy for fair users (Score:5, Interesting)

    by iamacat (583406) on Wednesday May 14, @05:59PM (#23410566)
    Recording your own music video to a popular tune and for non-commercial use should be considered fair use. It's unlikely that you are competing with any official distribution of the song or its derivative products. On the other hand, such use is essential for a society to have any kind of culture. If you can not record a video of your 1 year old son dancing to a well-known song, your ability to participate in the society and extended family is seriously curtailed.

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by vux984 (928602)
      If you can not record a video of your 1 year old son dancing to a well-known song, your ability to participate in the society and extended family is seriously curtailed.

      What if you can do it provided you license that well-known song for the purpose for whi

      • Re:YouTube's unspoken policy for fair users (Score:4, Interesting)

        by iamacat (583406) on Wednesday May 14, @06:20PM (#23410836)

        What if you can do it provided you license that well-known song for the purpose for which you intend to use it?
        If such a license was practically feasible for an average citizen (who can afford perhaps $20 for perpetual right to distribute the video to interested audience, which is likely to be family and friends), it would remove my objections to make such licensing mandatory rather than allowing license-free fair use.

        This licensing would have to be neutral to opinions/cultural values/etc expressed in the non-commercial derived work and encapsulate all cases in one fee. If I distribute a home video of my dance performance to 5 songs, I do not expect to pay $100.

        • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

          by packeteer (566398)
          What if they considered licensing the songs out to users in that way and decided against it? What if they calculated it out and found it is not a good business decision? Should the government then force them to distribute their media in a way that harms

      • Re:YouTube's unspoken policy for fair users (Score:5, Insightful)

        by owlnation (858981) on Wednesday May 14, @06:36PM (#23411050)

        What if you can do it provided you license that well-known song for the purpose for which you intend to use it?
        While this is indeed the RIAA's mercenary position, that doesn't make it fair or reasonable. The OP is correct. It should be fair use to use a piece of music in the example quoted, provided there's no intent to make money from it.

        Those bastards in the RIAA want to have their cake and eat it too. They practice payola to promote songs so that they get heard, and then once they get heard they charge radio stations for playing them.

        While they are slowly dying as a result of failing to adapt, there's still much to be done to make the record labels die faster. Take wikipedia for example -- it feels like every second page has a sentence or paragraph that promotes some band, or song. You know the "The Blahblah, wrote a song about the French Revolution, it's on the XYZ album" Yep... That's spam. Wikipedia is absolutely full of it. Even most music articles (that actually have sources) quote sources that are media articles derived from RIAA press releases, or direct to the band's own marketing devices such as their MySpace or Website. That's how the Record Labels make more money. That sort of crap needs to be stopped.
      • Alternatively, how about we define a standard set of metadata to describe Copyright Status Assertions, and use those those in place of the current (lame) DMCA takedown -> counter-notice process?

        The point is to give the uploader a chance to assert a Fair Use claim *beforehand*, and subsequently have the conflict automatically transferred to him/her instead of automatically taking the content down. This would still be imperfect, of course, but it would prevent some of the suppression-oriented DMCA abuse that the current setup facilitates.

        In the case of Item 1 below, the clip would stay up, and the person filing the complaint would be referred to the uploader to haggle over the Fair Use claim. Item 2 would be rejected up-front, and Item 3 would get taken down and possibly land the uploader in hot water as well.

        Uploaded Item 1 - item from TFA:
        + Track 1: Video
                Copyright: 2008, Joe's Hillarious Parodies LLC
                Disposition: Poster's Original Work
        + Track 2: Audio Track
                Copyright: Third Party
                Disposition: Fair Use
                Assertion: Used for Parody Purposes

        Uploaded Item 2 - Ripped/transcoded SNL clip, poster describes honestly:
        + Track 1: Video
                Copyright: Third Party
                Disposition: Totally Ripped Off
                Assertion: Ha Ha, Try and Catch Me
        + Track 2: Audio Track
                Copyright: Third Party
                Disposition: Totally Ripped Off
                Assertion: Ha Ha, Try and Catch Me

        Uploaded Item 3 - same SNL video clip, uploader used bald-faced lies:
        + Track 1: Video
                Copyright: 2008, Me
                Disposition: Original Work
        + Track 2: Audio Track
                Copyright: 2008, Third Party
                Disposition: Licensed, Used By Permission

    • Oh don't worry, you can record a video of your one year old son dancing to some music. Sure.

      And then we'll sue you and crush you like the bug that you are in court.

      Sincerely, the RIAA

    • On the other hand, such use is essential for a society to have any kind of culture. If you can not record a video of your 1 year old son dancing to a well-known song, your ability to participate in the society and extended family is seriously curtailed.

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by LordNimon (85072)
      If you can not record a video of your 1 year old son dancing to a well-known song, your ability to participate in the society and extended family is seriously curtailed.

      -1 flamebait

      You can record a video of your son dancing to a well-known song. Wha

      • Re:YouTube's unspoken policy for fair users (Score:5, Insightful)

        by iamacat (583406) on Wednesday May 14, @06:22PM (#23410870)
        Yeah, in Saudi Arabia you can not even watch movies or listen to music and the society adapted. But, do we want to live in an oppressed society where medium-income individuals can not contribute to popular culture?

        • Of course not. (Score:5, Funny)

          by raehl (609729) <raehl311NO@SPAMyahoo.com> on Wednesday May 14, @07:16PM (#23411504) Homepage
          I'd like to live in a society where high-income individuals are prohibited from 'contributing' to popular culture.

          Nobody should take your cultural influence seriously unless your rent is a couple months late.

        • Re:YouTube's unspoken policy for fair users (Score:5, Interesting)

          by colmore (56499) on Thursday May 15, @12:14AM (#23413964) Journal
          You are aware that recording eventually put the majority of musicians out of business.

          Every fancy restaurant in the country, not to mention every hotel, every dance, every social gathering that wanted to have music HIRED a full band.

          Before the movies and TV, every town had multiple Vaudeville and Theater houses.

          People used to go to school for music because it was a *smart career move*

          If things changed and the people creators sell their 'rights' to no longer had monopoly control - society would adapt. The current models for profiting off of works would mostly fail (though not small performers, they by and large sell their recordings & films at cost to generate attention for live performance) you're not allowing yourself to imagine our society becoming something very different from what it is.

          Which it of course has been doing continuously.

          Also you don't know what you're talking about re: Saudi Arabia and you're full of crap.

  • embedding not really 'disabled' (Score:5, Informative)

    by Sirius25 (96063) on Wednesday May 14, @06:23PM (#23410888)
    It's funny that they say "Embedding disabled by request".

    They removed the ready-made embed tag, but you can still easily embed it using the video ID from the URL.
    Like for this Modest Mouse video, just copy the embed tag from a non-disabled video & replace it's ID with HLkC8l3nJro ....

  • No Embed? Fixed that for ya... (Score:5, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 14, @06:28PM (#23410948)
    http://youtube.com/watch?v=HLkC8l3nJro

    becomes

    http://youtube.com/v/HLkC8l3nJro

    Enjoy.

    --AC

  • That's one way... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by themushroom (197365) on Wednesday May 14, @09:08PM (#23412600) Homepage
    ...to get videos and songs online that the labels linked to haven't bothered to make available for sale. Call it win-win. People get to see/hear this stuff, and the labels get interest expressed in something they'd presumed there was no further profit in offering.

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