YouTube, it’s reported, is working on an advertising revenue sharing mechanism that rewards creativity and generates cold hard cash for people who include advertising in their videos.
The offer applies only to people who own the full copyright of the videos that they are uploading to the YouTube website.
Right. But surely they’re not suggesting that people upload material for which they don’t own the full copyright currently do they?
Here’s a hypothetical based on a discussion at work today.
A media owner puts up a video of a popular band. Someone steals that video and posts it to YouTube.
In my hypothetical case, the copyright owner doesn’t spot that the video’s on YouTube – they don’t have the manpower to be constantly searching YouTube for new infringements. The person who stole the video, by the way, lives in the Cayman Islands or Cuba or Liechtenstein or somewhere else well beyond US jurisdication just for good measure.
The uploaded video is by a well known band and contains a popular new single. Something that many people are searching for.
The person who uploaded it starts earning $xx,000. We don’t know how much, but there are lots of views of it. Lots and lots of views.
The cash gets paid out in whatever mechanism.
Then a year down the line, the media owner spots the video and gets YouTube to take it down.
Who’s entitled to that cash? Can YouTube get the money back from our tax-exiled uploader. Sure, the account can be suspended, but it’s not really that hard to open another, and get a new bank account for cashing future cheques.
The media owner not only wants that advertising revenue, but the share that YouTube earned and compensation since the video was never licenced for taking advertising, and if it did, it would want way more than that!
In this instance Google/YouTube probably pay the media owner off. But how many times can this happen?
Maybe someone at YouTube has to watch each video that’s included in the ad revenue scheme to determine whether it belongs to someone other than the uploader. But how do they know? It’s a new band the YouTube video watcher has never heard of. As the uploader I might be a bandmember wanting to promote my new single and well within my rights, in which case it’s fine. Or I might be a keen fan who’s broken the band’s copyright even though he’s just trying to promote it.
As far as I know the DCMA only stays in force while someone isn’t monitoring everything that goes up. When they do start looking, doesn’t that protection fall away?