by Eliot Van Buskirk and Sean Michaels
Tuesday, 18 July 2006
YouTube's 'New' Terms Still Fleece Musicians
Topic: 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).

The root of the problem is that our copyright laws are in shambles (thanks to abusive amendments dictated by the recording and movie industries.)

Of COURSE YouTube and many other Internet "content" sites are gonna try to get away with "owning" as much of what comes their way as they can.

I'm happy to say DMusic don't play that way!

I searched high and low for a music-posting site that didnt steal my copyright. A few years ago I found boycott-riaa thur a link at ZDnet.com discussing .... you guessed it, P2P and copyright

Dmusic's terms are musician and fan friendly and also why it's the only music site Im interrested in dealing with.

I've got a lot of issues with YouTube and this is just one more to add to the fire.

May I repost this on my site?