And this is why I don’t use YouTube
Posted by kevin at 12:42am on Thursday, July 3, 2008 EDT
Filed under: Business
Not 100% Japanese movie-related but I just saw this article on how Google is being forced to hand over all records of videos watched on YouTube along with users’ IP addresses to Viacom in an attempt to prove that infringing material is more popular than user-created, and it reminded me of some finger-wagging I’ve been meaning to do. I’ve been a fan of YouTube since the beginning and I’ve probably learned more stupid, pointless crap there than anywhere else (which I enjoy immensely), but it’s not without its negatives. In the beginning YouTube was a seemingly-endless wonderland of Japanese variety shows, movie clips, and hard to find odds and ends. Then Google bought them out and every mega corporation, foreign and domestic, started seeing them as a target.
I used to maintain a YouTube account with hundreds of Asian movie trailers that I had collected from my own DVD collection and various official websites until one day Kadokawa decided they wanted to “negotiate” with Google, and in the process they started sending in DMCA requests demanding G take down every Kadokawa trailer on the site. It was a total purge and unfortunately if you have more than one offending clip on your account they don’t wait for you to take it down, they count them up all at once and after a certain number they just delete you from the system along with everything you’ve ever uploaded up to that point. That’s why every few months you’ll see a new person—who probably thinks they’re the first to think of it—start uploading Asian movie trailers under one account. Then invariably a few months after that all those clips will be gone and people will wonder why half their blog is now filled with empty players that say “We’re sorry, this clip is no longer available.” but still leak pagerank to YouTube via the built-in JavaScript link.
That’s why I started using my own player—I guarantee it’s not because I just love paying for all that extra bandwidth or tediously re-sizing preview images. YouTube is always going to be a target of corporate greed and us poor suckers are the ones that get caught in the middle of it. I realize most of the time that’s where everything can be found first, I’m just saying if you need to upload something that may not “officially” belong to you even though it seems okay (like a trailer), you’d be better off using one of the other video services that doesn’t get quite as much heat like Veoh or Metacafe because YouTube is in for a world o’ hurt in the very near future.
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Comments
Definitely, and I think for the most part they love free PR and would not complain about trailers on most any other site. They just use any leverage they can get in the negotiations for some sort of system where G pays them a huge blanket fee for rights. I’ve never once gotten so much as a minor complaint for the trailers I host here. A few companies have even offered to provide them to me if needed. So in a way it’s completely unfair for YouTube to be singled out. Frankly I’d be pissed if I kept getting take-down demands for content on my site if it was widely available all over the rest of the web, but that’s the price you pay for being an infinity kajillion dollar company.
Posted by kevin at 7:24am EDT on Thursday, July 3, 2008
different people consider different things to be free advertising, surely.
i bet there’s people “sharing” films and music in full thinking they’re encouraging
sales, but as the anime market eventually found out (but still didn’t want to realise) you strip the value out of what you supposedly support, because nobody’s obligued to then pay for it.
trailer are fair game though, i think.
Posted by logboy at 2:27pm EDT on Thursday, July 3, 2008
Let’s all pour beer on the curb for cinemanian. I can’t find the actual offending videos but after some brief detective work in Google’s cache it looks like he was frantically trying to remove Kadokawa Pictures’ trailers manually before they banned him for his troubles anyway. The moral of the story is don’t upload any of Kadokawa’s trailers to YouTube. And don’t link to anyone that does either because they’re doomed.
Posted by kevin at 1:23am EDT on Monday, July 7, 2008
It always surprises me that a company will force youtube to remove what i consider free advertising.
Posted by Raku at 6:20am EDT on Thursday, July 3, 2008