The newly revised Terms and Conditions page at YouTube raises important questions for anyone who uploads videos there. Eliot Van Buskirk at the Wired News music blog "Listening Post" writes:

Musicians such as Billy Bragg have been complaining about networking/music site MySpace's terms of use – and rightfully so. MySpace is said to be changing its tune, and should be posting updated terms soon (currently, its About page is offline).

The video site YouTube constitutes an equal or larger threat to small content producers. Before you upload that video of your 19-person indie rocker reggae band, for instance, you may want to read the fine print. YouTube's "new" Terms & Conditions allow them to sell whatever you uploaded however they want:

"…by submitting the User Submissions to YouTube, you hereby grant YouTube a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free, sublicenseable and transferable license to use, reproduce, distribute, prepare derivative works of, display, and perform the User Submissions in connection with the YouTube Website and YouTube's (and its successor's) business… in any media formats and through any media channels."

Among other things, this means they could strip the audio portion of any track and sell it on a CD. Or, they could sell your video to an ad firm looking to get "edgy"; suddenly your indie reggae tune could be the soundtrack to a new ad for SUVs. The sky's still the limit, when it comes to the rights you surrender to YouTube when you upload your video. Perhaps even scarier is the idea that anyone who might eventually buy YouTube would automatically obtain these same rights. Since YouTube is so popular, with 100 million videos shown each day, it's an attractive acquisition target for any number of companies.

Author/podcaster/robot-handler Violet Blue has a related post here, and Andrew at PuppetVision blog has a related post here.

Reader comment: ttrentham says,

As a musician whose band has music on MySpace, I did a little snooping after reading Xeni's post today about YouTube's terms. It does look like MySpace has altered theirs to more favorable terms as of June 15th.

"MySpace.com does not claim any ownership rights in the text, files, images, photos, video, sounds, musical works, works of authorship, or any other materials (collectively, "Content") that you post to the MySpace Services. After posting your Content to the MySpace Services, you continue to retain all ownership rights in such Content, and you continue to have the right to use your Content in any way you choose. By displaying or publishing ("posting") any Content on or through the MySpace Services, you hereby grant to MySpace.com a limited license to use, modify, publicly perform, publicly display, reproduce, and distribute such Content solely on and through the MySpace Services."

I hate to be put in the position of trying to defend an onerous license... but the excerpt you posted on BoingBoing is a little misleading. It continues, "...The foregoing license granted by you terminates once you remove or delete a User Submission from the YouTube Website."

That last little bit is pretty important. It means that if you remove the work from the YouTube site, they have to stop using your work. So there is some protection for users who have uploaded original content. If YouTube were to sublicense your content to an advertising agency, for example, and you were to remove the content--thus revoking the grant under the terms of the agreement--then the agency's license would be revoked as well. That's not really a tenable situation for advertisers or businesses, who are unlikely to sublicense content with such strings attached.

Upon reading the entire section, in context, it's pretty clear that YouTube is trying to ensure they are covered from attacks by users if they use videos featured on the site for promotional purposes, and also to allow the sharing of video content on other's blogs, sites, etc. My first inclination when seeing something like that is to recoil in horror, too. However, sometimes actually reading the license and parsing what the real impact is can be useful.

Either way, I won't be uploading any of my content to YouTube under these terms -- archive.org, revver, and other services offer more uploader-friendly terms, and Creative Commons licenses with those services and others allow you to specify more precisely what forms of reuse you're okay with.

I'd welcome further analysis from folks versed in this area of law, and will gladly post any reply from YouTube, too.

justin wood says,

you-tube's terms and conditions are eerily similar to att/sbc's new conditions re: their dsl/internet service. how a company can "own" your content by you using their service, especially if you pay for it, is beyond me.

The longer term question is, can YouTube find a business model that won't completely screw up their wonderful offering or will they ultimately go the way of Napster?

To clarify, YouTube never intended to sell, and never obtained any rights to sell, any User Submissions on CD or other physical media. The sentence you quoted was intended to enable YouTube to syndicate all or part of our website through third party websites (including to enable our embed functionality), in mobile contexts, and similar types of syndication. (...) The sentences that were omitted in the paragraph quoted are [italicized] below in context:

For clarity, you retain all of your ownership rights in your User Submissions. However, by submitting the User Submissions to YouTube, you hereby grant YouTube a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free, sublicenseable and transferable license to use, reproduce, distribute, prepare derivative works of, display, and perform the User Submissions in connection with the YouTube Website and YouTube's (and its successor's) business, including without limitation for promoting and redistributing part or all of the YouTube Website (and derivative works thereof) in any media formats and through any media channels. You also hereby grant each user of the YouTube Website a non-exclusive license to access your User Submissions through the Website, and to use, reproduce, distribute, prepare derivative works of, display and perform such User Submissions as permitted through the functionality of the Website and under these Terms of Service. The foregoing license granted by you terminates once you remove or delete a User Submission from the YouTube Website.

posted by Xeni Jardin at 09:07:57 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments