Silencing YouTube videos for fun and profit
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Facebook it! | 04/26/09
Tonight I went on YouTube to watch a video I had found before, but came back to find that it was silenced. The video was there, just not the sound. Underneath the video in red highlighting was the following:
Notice: This video contains an audio track that has not been authorized by WMG. The audio has been disabled.
WMG is Warner Music Group, the company that was founded before the Depression and owns all of this. There was no doubt that the video was a recording of a broadcast — somebody probably digitized it from an old VHS tape — and I also don’t have any reason to doubt that it was being replayed (tens of thousands of times) on YouTube without permission from WMG.
Apparently, too, the contracts are pretty clear as to who owns the rights to the music. Some artists are finding their own music videos being taken off of YouTube and can’t embed them in their own website.
YouTube is getting flak from its users about its decision to allow users found to have posted copyrighted material to (a) contest it, (b) take the entire video down, (c) switch the soundtrack for something that’s allowable, or (d) take down just the audio track. A large number of users are taking option (d), leaving many videos the way of silent film.
It’s easy to bash a big company’s heavy-handed tactics, but as a (wannabe) professional musician, I can appreciate that they want to protect the rights that they paid for. The rights to broadcast, sell, lease, whatever, their music are theirs, not the musicians’, not the people’s who posted the video, and not mine. I wouldn’t want to pay for lessons, backup musicians, studio time, production costs, marketing costs, and distribution costs, and be left without any way to recoup my costs, and profit, because someone took my work, posted it on YouTube, for anyone in the world to see, for free. I’d want to control it. So does WMG.
Further, despite all this, the burden is on WMG to prove that posted videos infringe on their rights. It’s time-consuming to track this down, and it amounts to swatting flies. I’ve found this out trying to get blogspot to take down content that someone else is taking directly from my feed, posting, and slapping their own advertising up. It wasn’t enough to give a few examples of the infringed content. Two weeks after I did this, I got an e-mail from blogspot saying that, yes, those posts was infringed on, and they had been removed. Just those posts. All the rest remained up. Following that, I went through and listed all two hundred plus posts that he stole, and the corresponding URLs on his site. That did the trick. But it was my job to prove it. Now, I’d rather have it difficult to prove than easy, because it means that any Joe Schmo can’t just contact my ISP because he’s bored and have my content taken down. There has to be proof.
So anyway, I have to support people being able to enjoy the (monetary) benefits of what they own. But why did YouTube decide to allow users to silence the videos found to be in copyright violation? I have my own little theory. I think it’s their way of getting the big boys like WMG to negotiate. It goes like this:
- YouTube user posts a recording of a music video off of a (protected) broadcast.
- Owner of broadcast files a copyright claim.
- YouTube informs user and lays out the options.
- YouTube user does one of the options, informs YouTube of which one.
- YouTube carries out action, and posts a notice saying why the soundtrack is disabled/switched if the user decides to modify the soundtrack or take it away.
- Someone comes along to watch the video, sees the message about the modified/removed sountrack.
Now, what kind of comments will be posted on that video? The viewer will be disappointed. Who will they take it out on? The person posting the video? Probably not: “Yeah, they did that to other videos I posted.” YouTube? Maybe, but why get mad at YouTube when they can get mad at the entity that initiated the action? And how kind of YouTube to tell us exactly the company that initiated the action? That’s a much bigger, much juicier target. It guarantees a lot of vocal, searchable ill will against the owner of the copyright, even though it was perfectly within their purview to exercise their rights. Looks like a long-term tactic for having them (the copyright owners) reach some kind of agreement for YouTube (and others) to broadcast their content legally.
But in the meantime, WMG and others do what they can to contest unauthorized broadcast of their works. The cat’s out of the bag, though: Internet users are now used to a really good setup — on-demand, and free — and it will be impossible to get them to pay for something they’ve been getting for free for a few years now.
Interesting how this will all develop. In the meantime, though, it will be harder to find decent bootlegged copies of movies, television shows, and music videos to watch for free on YouTube. 
