YouTube and Copyright

If it has not happened to you in your video assignments, it is more likely occur in doing remix/mashup assignments- a notice from YouTube about copyright violation.

It sucks. You get mad.

They use a technology called ContentID that is automatically able to determine if a users upload includes video or audio that matches copyrighted content. The movie studios, song publishers that own the copyright to a movie have an ability to trigger this automatically. Sometimes you just get a warning, sometimes it prevents you from embedding media, and in some cases your video night be removed outright.

It feels unfair, especially if the source clips themselves come from YouTube (it is not called "YourTube"). In education, you have some provision for using copyrighted media under te guidelines of fair use- this is not a free license, but hinges on four factors:


 * the purpose and character of your use
 * the nature of the copyrighted work
 * the amount and substantiality of the portion taken, and
 * the effect of the use upon the potential market.

which you can see are not quite formulaic. If you are going to use published movies or songs in your works, doing simple montages, e.g. just editing clips together, is not all that different from the original in the eyes of the law. You are on better ground if your work is really something new beyond the original work.

See YouTube's explanation on fair use but really the best resource is Fair Use Tube.

You have a few options if this happens in te course of your creative ds106 work.


 * Revise your work so it is more original, more different from the copyrighted work. Is that song really critical? Can you use creative commons licensed material? Are there other clips you can use?
 * Upload your video to vimeo, which does not employ content ID (but you agree that anything you upload is not copyrighted content). Yes this is easier and will solve the immediate problem of your video being able to be seen, but does not strictly prevent you from any implications of copyright violation.
 * Appeal the YouTube action under the realms of fair use. See the Fairuse Tube site for detailed information on what steps you can take.

For more insight see Kind of Screwed – Andy Baio’s tale of trying to do everything right in doing a derivative work and still getting sued. Opens many questions on copyright, fair use, derivative works.

But this is also a call for you to ponder about such ownership of popular culture. Should we have access to repurpose content to create new art? And consider the shoe on the other foot; how do you feel about people you do not know appropriating creative works you have made?