[Infowarrior] - YouTube's controversial T&C

[Richard Forno]

(remember when GeoCities and/or Microsoft tried this a few years ago and
ultimately changed their T&C after major public complaints??  -rf)

YouTube's 'New' Terms Still Fleece Musicians
http://blog.wired.com/music/#1523392

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 playing its new single, 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:

"Šby 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) businessŠ 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).