 How your copyright rights are affected by YouTube. An overview of the YouTube terms of service and how your distribution rights are affected when you post videos on YouTube. If you watch the news at all, chances are you have seen a YouTube video as part of a news story. For those unaware, YouTube is a video sharing website owned by Google. Users can upload and share their videos. As it happens, "YouTube video" is somewhat of a misnomer, as YouTube does not create or own the videos on its site. YouTube is simply an online hosting site for a collection of user videos, recorded by thousands of people all over the world. But what happens when one such video gains national attention via TV news outlets? When such a video is on the news, there is usually a credit in the corner of the video acknowledging that the video was found on YouTube. This begs the question, however, "What about the video's creator? Doesn't he or she deserve credit?" The answer, according to YouTube, is a simple one: no. In YouTube's terms of service, which every user must accept before uploading a video, the rules are stated very clearly. "By submitting 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." In layman's terms, by submitting content to YouTube, you are giving Google permission to use your content however it pleases. It is important to remember that the majority of YouTube's profits come from advertising. Therefore, the more exposure YouTube gains, the more money Google will make. To put it in perspective, it currently costs $175,000 dollars a day to advertise on the front page of YouTube. This number can be expected to rise as YouTube becomes even more popular. You can now see why it is imperative that YouTube be able to distribute a user's content without specific permission by the owner. This necessity for promotion leads us to another interesting
|
