Comments on: YouTube's filters help copyright owners profit from pirated videos

Hollywood has long called for YouTube to help copyright owners scrub the site of unauthorized videos. Now, copyright owners are using the site's copyright filters to help generate ad revenue.

[Pete Bardo]

If copyright owners agree to share in the ad revenue from a pirated video, is it still pirated? Haven't they then approved the sharing of the video at that point?

[Renegade Knight]

Yes, but they have also asserted control.

[Renegade Knight]

So I post a music video where I do a voice over and parody the original. It's a hit, the original copyright holder of the original material uses the filter to steal my hard work in making the parody which as it happens is copyrighted by me. Sounds like a lot of potential for abuse.

[Renegade Knight]

"Several start-ups are working on technology that will track unauthorized videos wherever they exist on the Web and then insert an advertisement into the clips. "

This would violate the copyright of every website that has made legitimate fair use of materials. Much of fair use is with "unauthorized" materials. The point being that with fair use some things you just don't have to ask permission to do.

[OokiiMamoru]

As long as the ad is not intrusive on the folk art, and lets face it, taking someone else's work, changing it, is a form of folk art, then I say go for. The original intent of the copyright holder was to make money.

[badasscat]

The problem is now you are making money from somebody *else's* copyrighted work (even if a piece of art uses copyrighted work under fair use terms, it is still copyrighted itself by the new creator). And that would *not* be considered fair use by any court.

The record labels have to be really careful here. This could backfire in a pretty serious way unless they're very, very narrow in their usage of the clips the "claim".

One bit of stupidity that they're already doing is disabling embedding on most of these clips. Apparently they don't see a need to actually promote any of their artists.

[skeptic47]

I believe both Google and this article overstate the enthusiasm of copyright owners to use this revenue-sharing model. The NYT wrote about this some time ago, and a blogger documented that the claims were overstated -- http://nancyprager.wordpress.com/2008/08/17/a-supplement-to-the-new-york-times-article-on-youtube-and-its-videoid-initiative/ . Also, if we're going to see reports like this, how can we not be told what the financial terms are so we can see whether it would be in the best interest of copyright owners to participate. It's pretty out there to say this undermines Viacom's case if we're talking pennies.