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YouTube Doesn’t Care About Original Indie Content

Yesterday I uploaded the video below to YouTube. It’s just a simple amateur recording I shot of the Fountains of Bellagio last week while I was in Las Vegas.

Shortly after it finished uploading to YouTube, I received the following email:

Dear TheTimSeattle,

Your video, Fountains of Bellagio: The Pink Panther Theme, may have content that is owned or licensed by EMI Music Publishing.

No action is required on your part; however, if you are interested in learning how this affects your video, please visit the Content ID Matches section of your account for more information.

Sincerely,
– The YouTube Team

Yup, despite all the booms and ooohs and aaahs distorting the music, YouTube nearly instantly recognized The Pink Panther Theme song playing in my video, and felt the need to send me a nasty-gram warning me about the usage of “third party content” in my video. At least this one didn’t get totally blocked like the one-minute video I uploaded a year or two ago of the contents of a Woot Bag of Crap with massively distorted audio of “The Final Countdown” playing in the background.

Okay, fine. Whatever. I get that the big publishing companies want to “protect” their “intellectual property,” and it’s easy for YouTube to automatically detect things like this and take action.

What I don’t get is why when someone uploads an exact copy one of my videos that’s on YouTube, YouTube does absolutely nothing. I shot the video below of a crazy electrical installation about a year ago.

After I uploaded it to YouTube and posted it to Seattle Bubble, it took off, rapidly racking up hundreds of thousands of views. Shortly after it became popular on YouTube, some user downloaded it and uploaded it to Break.com as their own. Then, other users started uploading copies to YouTube.

Did I learn about this via an automated message from YouTube about my video’s copyright being violated? Nope. I only found out because friends pointed out that my video was embedded on various websites, and when I clicked through to YouTube from those sites I discovered that my video had been uploaded by another user.

To its credit, YouTube does react quickly when you use their Copyright Infringement Notification form to report this sort of abuse, usually taking down the offending video the same day. However, it’s still quite annoying that I’ve had to personally hunt down copies of my video that have been uploaded by other users (seven other users, so far) and manually fill out that form, despite the fact that YouTube obviously has technology capable of automatically detecting things like this.

It’s also worth mentioning that when you fill out YouTube’s Copyright Infringement Notification form, there’s a field where they ask for the address of original YouTube video that the offending video is violating the copyright of. And yet, when they do take down the offending video, they don’t bother providing a link to the original content anywhere on the page. Instead, you just get a generic page that looks like this:

They can put links in the video space. Why wouldn’t they put a link to the original content on the removed video when a user like myself explicitly tells them where the original content is?

If YouTube really wants users to upload original content, why wouldn’t they use their existing tools to provide better copyright protection for independent original content, instead of intentionally turning a blind eye to infringement that they are easily capable of automatically detecting?

I can only conclude that YouTube doesn’t care about original indie content.

“He was playing music… while I… did stuff.”

I’d like to take a brief moment to share one of my favorite scenes from one of my favorite television shows of all time, Malcolm in the Middle.

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Thanks to the idiotic complexity of music licensing, only Season 1 of Malcolm in the Middle ever made it to DVD. If Fox released the rest of the series I’d buy it today, but instead they seem to prefer that their fans pirate the show online. Whatever.

I guess I’m a famous videographer now?

So, a few weeks ago I shot this video:

I posted it on Seattle Bubble, it got a few thousand views, and we all had some laughs. I didn’t think much more about it.

…until a week or so later, when the video started to spread.

First it appeared on Fark, then on White Trash Repairs, then on Reddit. Total number of views on YouTube shot up to over 20,000! Wow!

At some point, some jerkface decided to steal it and upload their crappy stolen copy to the popular video site Break.com, where it proceeded to get over 300,000 views!

Then someone else stole it from Break and uploaded it to their own YouTube account, where a few more sites found it, including Jim the Realtor’s blog and Sports Illustrated. Fortunately both YouTube and Break were responsive and helpful. YouTube took down the other copies on their site, and Break transferred the copy on there to my account.

A few days later, someone at Gawker (a very popular blog) found it and posted it on their site, after which it was re-posted on their sister tech blog Gizmodo. Another Reddit user found it and posted it there again, this time making it to the front page.

Meanwhile, the video also made its way on a few other popular sites, including Geekologie and even a German site called Brainblog. Nice!

As of this writing, between YouTube and Break my video has been viewed over 850,000 times! Yesterday at this time it was at about 750,000, so if this pace keeps up, my video will be viewed by over a million viewers by this time next week!