Sunday, March 04, 2007

Wow, They're Getting Faster

So here's the timeline:

At midnight last night, Mark Evanier highlights a YouTube video of an interview with Charles Schulz.

This morning, a few hours later, the video can't be accessed because it has been taken down "due to terms of use violation."

Pretty soon YouTube will be able to take things down within thirty seconds of anybody finding out about them.

Actually, there are quite a few things remaining on YouTube that would, normally, be yanked by the copyright holder. What the uploaders do is make sure not to include certain key words in the description or the title -- words that the copyright owners use when searching for stuff to yank. What that means, ultimately, is that YouTube and other services are still useful as a way for people to upload stuff and then send them to friends, or embed them on their websites. But if you want to upload things so other people can find them in the search engine, remember that that means that The Man can find them too.

3 comments:

Yeldarb86 said...

YouTube has officially lost its grip on free speech. And for that, the corporations win again.

Anonymous said...

I think "terms of use violation" represents that the user was banned, not that a copyright holder took it off. Didn't that happen recently to your account? I recall at least one video disappearing to terms of use violation, only to reappear under a new username (based on an old song you've highlighted on this site).

Anonymous said...

I agree with anonymous above. And I always wondered why the same user posted quite so many Lubitsch clips by himself. So when that account went they all went.