The Heavy Hand of YouTube Censorship Spares No One
Posted in Random by Dan at 10:50 pm
This post was published 9 months 20 days ago and its content may not be valid anymore.
YouTube has been quietly hitting the mute key on unauthorized music being uploaded to their service. They feel this is the best way to battle music piracy. However, it seems that YouTube isn’t just targeting music, they are going after anything that is not user generated.
Case and point, a Stevenote (Or a Keynote by Steve Jobs for the non Apple faithful). Seems that the iron fist of YouTube has silenced even the fabled reality distortion field.
This video contains an audio track that has not been authorized by all copyright holders. The audio has been disabled.
Wonder if this is something Apple requested, or is something that just seemed to get caught in YouTube piracy fishing net?
I noticed this feature today, not sure when they started doing it but it’s incredibly fail… I use YouTube a lot for music and such at work since they released the playlist functionality. Just search a band and sit back and enjoy the music mishmash that comes up. Thanks to this wonderful feature you’ll get nice 3 minute chunks of silence. I’m currently looking into the player plugin to see if I can find some flags in the flashvars or something that can be toggled via a greasemonkey script to reenable the audio track in the player. They’re just muting the sound object from what I can tell so tricking the player into enabling audio is the trick.
By default the disabled the JSAPI, I’m thinking override that so enable the JSAPI for the player then player.Volume = 100 should do the trick, but I’m at work now, so I’ll find out later tonight I suppose ;)
or you can just hit listen.grooveshark.com and hit autoplay. you can sitll make a playlsit of your favorite songs, but have it intersplcie related music when the playlist is finished.
And that will be the end of Youtube’s reign. Music is part of the Youtube fun, if they’re going to kill it, people will start moving elsewhere. No one is waiting for endless talking heads, music is part of the Youtube experience. It is bad for the music industry as well: I think a lot of people discover music and artists through Youtube, even when tracks are used by dancing kids, or whatever. My suggestion to Youtube would be to force users to credit music in their videos, instead of banning it.
YouTube only goes after what they’re told to go after, or so I think. A few of my clips have been targeted. Unfortunately, PR reps from the companies involved gave me permission to run one of them, so I had to go back and forth with them until their legal team figured it out (not YouTube’s, the company who commissioned the filtering/scanning.) Also a subcontractor went after another one of my videos, but instead of a takedown they placed ads on my video. Instead of battling it through the PR teams again, I just left it be. But F all these guys. I’m going to start hosting my own video and they’re going to have to really decide if they want to really hit me with a frivolous copyright or DMCA takedown notice. And of course they won’t have YouTube facilitating their scanning of my uploaded content.
I have had my family vacation videos pulled down from You Tube and scratch my head and ask when did lawyers become a part of this community? Obviously the creators are long gone. It is too easy and cheap to host my own videos, the fun and novelty of sharing on You Tube is gone.
Here is a question, is there a revenue stream in this for the musicians and artisans? Stock photography sites make it as easy to make a Pay Pal payment to buy usage of photography for commercial advertising. Why couldn’t the artisans set up their payment profile on You Tube, your video is posted, the “Big Brother” filter knows you have copyrighted material in your video and forwards you to the artisans’ Pay Pal account. You pay the license fee or the video comes down. You Tube take a cut similar to Ebay, the artisans make “free” money and everyone is happy!
My biggest problem with Youtube is when they take down my video and close my account, they don’t give me exact reasons. I don’t know if it’s because I’m using too many tag words or a description that isn’t quite matching the video. Or maybe somebody really did complain. I purchase royalty free music off the internet, and maybe there is a mix-up there. If they would at least be more specific I would comply in any way possible to keep my videos up.