Cool Marketing Thoughts

“Thank you for your content.” In a recent update in its terms and conditions, YouTube now claims they can do whatever they want with your content. No messages have been sent to the users to communicate this update, but they do have a new page ready: if you’re a musician, you can sign up through the musician page. They note that “YouTube Musician Channels are for musicians.” (yeah, makes it easier for them to isolate potential accounts that are worth some cash) and also that “Uploading videos or music that you do not own is a violation of the artist’s copyrights and against the law. If you upload material you do not own, your account will be deleted.” But if you upload your music, it’s no longer yours. The last part is what they don’t tell you.

“…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.”

What kind of content provider would agree to this, except for those who didn’t know? So if YouTube strikes a deal with a record company and they happen to like your tune, but not your face, they can sell your song to the record company so they can use it for a more ‘marketable’ face. Hmm. What are these guys thinking?

Another thing I want to note in the sideline: I’ve said it a few times already, YouTube speaks with two faces. As long as they benefit from the success of a clip, they won’t remove it. Even if it is against the law and legislation. The most recent thing is that video clip from Zidane’s headbutt. You really think any of the users that uploaded it paid for the rights? No. But have you got any idea what TV companies needed to pay to be able to broadcast footage from the World Cup? Millions, if not billions of dollars, euros or whatever. Seriously. Even The Times linked to the famous clip, and there are dozens of versions available, most of them are mixed with some copyrighted tune, for which no rights have been paid either. Have you seen YouTube taking these down? No. Because they benefit from the success. They can use the stats and say: hey we’ve got 100 million videos served a day. Sure. But if you only count the genuine home-made videos, how much is there left to brag with?

I can’t wait to see how they’ll ever gather the nerve to set things straight, instead of deleting an account here or there. They can cover their ass with stupid lines like: you can’t upload this or that, but in the end they keep providing the service, and actively allow for copyrighted content to become popular. Don’t tell me they don’t notice a clip that pulls millions of hits. Sure they see it. But as long as nobody complains, they’ll allow it to happen. And that’s going to cost them, sooner or later.

If they’d start removing all the clips with ’stolen music’, which means: clips with an entire song in them, and all the clips that have TV-content, they’ll not only lose more than half of their content, they’ll use a lot of users as well. And that would make them far less popular and successful than they are now.

Update:

Jennifer Nielsen, Marketing Manager for YouTube, writes:

To clarify, YouTube never intended to sell, and never obtained any rights to sell, any User Submissions on CD or other physical media. The sentence you quoted was intended to enable YouTube to syndicate all or part of our website through third party websites (including to enable our embed functionality), in mobile contexts, and similar types of syndication. (…) The sentences that were omitted in the paragraph quoted are [italicized] below in context:

For clarity, you retain all of your ownership rights in your User Submissions. However, 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, including without limitation for promoting and redistributing part or all of the YouTube Website (and derivative works thereof) in any media formats and through any media channels. You also hereby grant each user of the YouTube Website a non-exclusive license to access your User Submissions through the Website, and to use, reproduce, distribute, prepare derivative works of, display and perform such User Submissions as permitted through the functionality of the Website and under these Terms of Service. The foregoing license granted by you terminates once you remove or delete a User Submission from the YouTube Website.

Which makes it better and understandable.