Black Fox GR

I recently came across several online petitions asking from Youtube to stop deleting copyrighted material such like music videos, movies, and other shows. It is well knows that youtube follows a very strict policy regarding copyrights. At 2006 BBC has reported that “Its policy is to take down copyrighted material when it is alerted by the owners, but it has been criticized for not being vigilant enough. It has also developed technology that will allow it to block copyrighted videos” (Day accessed 27/2/2010). Indeed Youtube removes thousands of videos per day displaying a message  “This video is no longer available due to a copyright claim” after the deletion.

I would like to outline some of the reasons I disagree with that policy as I believe it is nonsense and it does not help anybody.

1) Youtube’s policy causes financial loss to the artists in the favor of the record labels: Every entertainment center (like radio stations, TV channels, hotels, pubs, etc) pays a small monthly fee to a copyright company while Youtube probably doesn’t. The copyright companies distribute the royalties to the artists depending on their popularity. For example, if a hotel would have to pay 50 euros per month for music license, from this amount the highest percentage will go to the artist who’s song-composition has been played mostly (royalty system based on popularity). The record companies are not involved to that.

Let’s face it, nobody can make a living by selling records anymore. The way the music industry works has changed dramatically during the last past years. Everyone who is professional musician knows very well that the 90% of his/her incomes come from live performances and music license distribution. Youtube’s policies allows  the record companies to claim copyrights and by deleting videos they unfairly reduce the publicity of a band. If Youtube would have to follow the same system and pay (perhaps insignificant amount for such a successful website), then the record labels would not have the right to claim copyrights.

2) It is not friendly for the new bands-artists: A lot of musicians who do cover songs upload them on youtube in order to attract the attention of the audience. Unlikely Youtube, Myspace allows cover songs to be uploaded (users have to select the “cover song” option) but Youtube is by far more famous in terms of video browsing and streaming. Removing a “cover song video” automatically reduces the chances of an unknown artist to gain more popularity.

3) Streaming is not similar to downloading. Uploading the latest videoclip from a very famous band (without allowing other users to download it) has nothing to do with stealing. A Youtube video is a file hosted to a specific server and not to a computer. This could not even be considered as sharing. Of course I cannot deny that people can create playlists (adding as many songs as they want and letting them play one after another instead of buying music) but in the end most of radio stations, some TV programs do the same which means that if a user cannot find his/her favorite song in the internet anymore, it is still available somewhere else.

4) Censorship: a) Youtube’s policy not only concerns videos who contain a full song, but even those who include parts of a copyrighted music. If for example a user would like to upload a video which contains the guitar solo of the song “Sweet Child O’Mine” in order to criticize Slash’s guitar skills and abilities, Youtube has the right to remove it. b) Users have the option to either allow others to comment on their videos or not. Despite that a lot of youtubers should be classified as very illiterate (a proof example is the incredible amount of offensive comments in almost each video), there is still a great percentage of those who really have valid and interesting points, those who’s critical speech is very considerable. Nevertheless, after the deletion all the comments (no matter if they are negative or positive) are disappeared. This of course circumstantially works as a form of censorship.

5) It annoys bloggers and website owners: This is perhaps not the most important reason, but it is still an issue. It is not very pleasant for those who have high traffic in their statistics to see their embedded videos removed. Sometimes it can take hours to replace them with similar material and even worse for those who embed Youtube playlists.

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