YouTube, Sony and copyright issues
I recently read a blog from Ted.com entitled, “ How YouTube thinks about copyright” by Margaret Gould Stewart.
I recently read a blog from Ted.com entitled, “ How YouTube thinks about copyright” by Margaret Gould Stewart.
The first thing I noticed about Margaret Gould Stewart was that she speaks in a monosyllabic tone, which immediately made me think she was going to be boring or at the very least hard for me to follow. However that was not the case because once I began to listen I quickly realized the content of information she had to share was extremely interesting and timely.
Margaret Gould Stewart inspired the audience by speaking on a topic of interest that has touched or been introduced to each and every persons life in the audience. Even for those individuals who had never personally used YouTube they had at some point in time been exposed to a viral video from YouTube.
She spoke about how Sony detects when the public has illegally copied their music/video and how they go about determining whether there’s a match. She spoke about how Sony can detect this match regardless of how many different changes are made by the copier. This is true even when there is poor sound quality; if they use just a portion or have degraded audio or video quality. Sony does this every time a video is uploaded and they are able to detect it because they compare each upload against all the references in their database. They do this each and every time a video is uploaded to every website including YouTube, which is over 20 hours of video every minute. Upon finding a match, they compare over 100 years of video uploaded everyday, which, according to Stewart would be like 36k people staring at 36k monitors each and every day without so much as a coffee break.
The speaker overcame adversity by stating that instead of blocking the illegally copied video Sony, the rights owners, allows the copy because they may potentially benefit through additional sales. She then went ahead to speak about Chris Brown’s video “Forever” and how it dropped off the charts last year until a couple uploaded their wedding video using the song, which eighteen months later got over 40m additional views. Instead of Sony blocking it they put advertising on it and links from it to ITunes and the song went back to number four on the ITunes chart.
The speaker taught me how and why companies like Sony allow amateurs to borrow video and audio from them without blocking or causing a great ruckus. The Chris Brown video inspired over $20k to end domestic violence and the wedding dance became so popular it was parodied on a television show on NBC called, “The Office.” By allowing choice through rights identification Sony received additional sales revenue. It helped me realize that if I have content that is being uploaded by YouTube users I should register through the content id system so I can have the choice of how that content is used. It also helped me realize to think carefully about the policies I attach to that content because by blocking reuse I may be blocking new art forms; audiences and possibly revenue streams.
http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/margaret_stewart_how_youtube_thinks_about_copyright.html
