YouTube – Broadcast Yourself – Video Sharing
I recently discovered the http://www.youtube.com website while browsing through other people’s blogs and wondered how they were able to place video onto their sites. YouTube allow the ability to do video shares by allowing users to register and use video embeds or API’s to integrate and share on their websites. YouTube place a watermark logo on the video clip to display the source, the site was first launched in February 2005.
Becoming a registered user you have the ability to save your favourite video clips to your My Favourites so you can always recall back to them as well as giving your own comments, personal ratings and even recommend them to friends.
The issue arises here about video copyright infringement breaking copyright laws and in particular videos which display shots from films, music videos, TV or commercials. What it all boils down too is that you still require the copyright owner’s permission to distribute any of this kind of material and even if you have provided credit to the owner the content is still copyrighted.
YouTube takes no responsibility for the misuse of video and leaves it down to your own personal judgement. They state “keep video completely original, film your own short movie and if it’s yours then you never have to worry about copyright”.
Read what YouTube says in their copyright policy and read it very carefully.
Conclusion while I think this is a great idea for a site and has good potentional for use of multimedia that can be shared world wide. I am personally a little dubious of its use and applying certain content to my site.
When searching videos also be weary of finding some unsolicited material that may pop up in the search results as the site appears to not have much monitoring or control of what’s uploaded. I do wonder if this site may possibly turn out to be another Napster spin off. Lets hope not and allow a global location to share content with permission over the web as it was traditionally intended.
Add comment October 8th, 2006