http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/06/12/youtube_owns_derivative_works/YouTube owns YourStuffSo does YouTubeTwo
By Andrew Orlowski
Published Monday 12th June 2006 16:13 GMT
The latest attempt to rebrand the web, "Web 2.0" has been evangelized as a platform for sharing - but it's increasingly looking like a platform tilted steeply in one direction.
Millions may be about to discover what singer Billy Bragg found out recently - that "community" hosting web sites can do as they please with creative material you submit.
In its Terms & Conditions, the wildly popular video sharing site YouTube emphasizes that "you retain all of your ownership rights in your User Submissions".
There's quite a large "BUT...", however. Not only does YouTube retain the right to create derivative works, but so do the users, and so too, does YouTube's successor company. Since YouTube has all the hallmarks of a very shortlived business - it's burned through $11.5m of venture investment (Sequoia Capital is the fall guy here) and has no revenue channels - this is more pertinent than may appear.
The license that you grant YouTube is worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free, sublicenseable and transferable. The simplest way to terminate it is by withdrawing your video. But even this is problematic, as OpenTV's Nathan Freitas wrote recently:
"It is good to know that if you delete a video from YouTube, then the rights you have granted them terminate. However, once they have distributed your video 'in any media format and through any media channel', that’s a little hard to take back, right?"
And if YouTube went titsup tomorrow, its successor YouTubeTwo would sit on a large library of irrevocable content.
For now, as Nathan noticed, YouTube regards its rights grab as something of a joke: You Tube treats its IP landgrab as a joke
As we've noted with this wave of web juvenilia, it's considered "Web 2.0" to take things like rights, and uptime flippantly. See Flakey Flickr goes down. Again.
Judging from a handful of sporadic blog posts, the issue has been troubling a few users for a while. But with the mainstream press still treating the handful of web hopefuls as if they represent the new Enlightenment, it has failed to catch much wider attention.
http://blog.wired.com/music/#1523392Tuesday, 18 July 2006
YouTube's 'New' Terms Still Fleece MusiciansTopic: News
Musicians such as Billy Bragg have been complaining about networking/music site MySpace's terms of use – and rightfully so. MySpace is said to be changing its tune, and should be posting updated terms soon (currently, its About page is offline).
The video site YouTube constitutes an equal or larger threat to small content producers. Before you upload that video of your 19-person indie rocker reggae band, for instance, you may want to read the fine print. YouTube's "new" Terms & Conditions allow them to sell whatever you uploaded however they want:
"…by submitting the User Submissions to YouTube, you hereby grant YouTube a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free, sublicenseable and transferable license to use, reproduce, distribute, prepare derivative works of, display, and perform the User Submissions in connection with the YouTube Website and YouTube's (and its successor's) business… in any media formats and through any media channels."
Among other things, this means they could strip the audio portion of any track and sell it on a CD. Or, they could sell your video to an ad firm looking to get "edgy"; suddenly your indie reggae tune could be the soundtrack to a new ad for SUVs. The sky's still the limit, when it comes to the rights you surrender to YouTube when you upload your video.
Perhaps even scarier is the idea that anyone who might eventually buy YouTube would automatically obtain these same rights. Since YouTube is so popular, with 100 million videos shown each day, it's an attractive acquisition target for any number of companies.
A lot of the more mainstream stuff on there was uploaded by people who didn't hold the copyrights. Videos on YouTube that were produced by large media companies would surely be filtered out before any mass redistribution were to take place. It's the small content producers who owned the copyrights to the stuff they uploaded who really have something to lose.
I wish YouTube didn't annex so many of its uploaders' rights, but if you keep the site's Terms and Conditions in mind, the site still has a lot to recommend it. Musicians and other content uploaders might want to take precautions though, such as submitting music videos with relatively low-quality audio or keeping parts of their catalogs off of YouTube. Hopefully, the site will start offering more levels of user control, so that uploaders will be able to specify how their songs get used (or, more importantly, how they don't get used).