[Infowarrior] - IP: YouTube owns YourStuff

[Richard Forno]

Original URL: 
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/06/12/youtube_owns_derivative_works/
YouTube owns YourStuff
By Andrew Orlowski
Published Monday 12th June 2006 16:13 GMT

Never trust a hippy - John Lydon

The latest attempt to rebrand the web, "Web 2.0" has been evangelized as a
platform for sharing - but it's increasingly looking like a platform tilted
steeply in one direction.

Millions may be about to discover what what singer Billy Bragg found out
recently, and that "community" hosting web sites can do as they please with
creative material you submit.

In its Terms & Conditions (http://youtube.com/t/terms), the wildly popular
video sharing site YouTube emphasizes that "you retain all of your ownership
rights in your User Submissions".

There's quite a large "BUT...", however. Not only does YouTube retain the
right to create derivative works, but so do the users, and so too, does
YouTube's successor company. Since YouTube has all the hallmarks of a very
shortlived business - it's burned through $11.5m of venture investment
(Sequoia Capital is the fall guy here) and has no revenue channels - this is
more pertinent than may appear.

The license that you grant YouTube is worldwide, non-exclusive,
royalty-free, sublicenseable and transferable. The simplest way to terminate
it is by withdrawing your video. But even this is problematic, as OpenTV's
Nathan Freitas wrote recently (http://openvision.tv/blog/?p=48):

"It is good to know that if you delete a video from YouTube, then the rights
you have granted them terminate. However, once they have distributed your
video 'in any media format and through any media channel', that¹s a little
hard to take back, right?"

And if YouTube went titsup tomorrow, its successor YouTubeTwo would sit on a
large library of irrevocable content.

For now, as Nathan noticed, YouTube regards its rights grab as something of
a joke: You Tube treats its IP landgrab as a joke

As we've noted with this wave of web juvenilia, it's considered "Web 2.0" to
take things like rights, and uptime flippantly. See Flakey Flickr goes down.
Again (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/04/14/flakey_flickr_fckd_again/).

Judging from a handful of sporadic blog posts, the issue has been troubling
a few users for a while. But with the mainstream press
(http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/11/24/nytimes_two_point_nought/) still
treating the handful of web hopefuls as if they represent the new