I’ve previously expressed concerns that Google’s renewed commitment to cracking down on copyright infringement will have a disastrous impact on YouTube and GoogleVideo potential as teaching tools/living media archives. Today, via CinemaTech, comes this Wall Street Journal article (if you’re not a subscriber, try this link) about people hired by companies like Viacom to seek out and request the removal of copyright content from YouTube.
The company profiled says they earn as much as $500,000 a month from each of the media companies that employ them. Most of their focus seems to be on removing music videos that have been illegally uploaded by MTV viewers, and comedy sketches illegally sourced from Comedy Central. Since many of these videos are available for legal streaming on MTV’s Overdrive and other sites, you have to wonder: since the average YouTube “pirate” surely doesn’t care enough about a company like Viacom to try to deliberately hurt them, why would they bother uploading these clips at all? Why would anyone want to watch a choppy YouTube clip of Same Girl when MTV.com has the same video, in a slicker player and at a higher resolution?
My guess is that a big part of it is the demand for embeddable clips — you can link to MTV.com’s videos, for example, but you can’t display them on your own blog or MySpace/Facebook page. A big part of the appeal of watching online videos is being able to share them. Teenagers especially seem drawn to the practice of using YouTube clips of their favorite music videos and funny scenes as building blocks in constructing their online identities. When you’re 16, your MySpace page is your personal portal, your social resume, the one-stop shop where friends and crushes can receive all your sanctioned information. If you were that 16-year-old, would you really want to have to “express yourself” by directing your friends to go check out all your favorite videos on Comedy Central’s website?
My big concern with the YouTube crackdown is that it will make it impossible to share hard-to-find media detritus: rare interviews and TV clips, scenes from films that aren’t on DVD, etc. It’s nice to see Delaney heavily imply that media companies are taking a hands-off approach to fan-altered clips containing copyrighted content, and just about anything else that could reasonably fit under Fair Use. There’s a sense that the big media conglomerates have had to pick their battles. While Viacom pays $100,000 a month to make sure that clips of Chappelle Show aren’t allowed to circulate, there seem to be an awful lot of four-month-old, camcorder-sourced clips from subsidiary Paramount’s Disturbia.
Another interesting tidbit from the story: employees at the company hired by Viacom blow off steam by sharing vintage oddities. “They combat the monotony by passing links to quirky clips around the office,” Kevin J. Delaney writes. “One recent oddball favorite was a video of a flamboyant German disco-era group performing in Genghis Khan-inspired outfits.” Surely, somebody somewhere owns the copyright to that, too.
