Some Good News from YouTube

"Search and Delete," the traditional approach to the unauthorized upload of copyrighted material such as songs and video, has recently been substituted by a more practical monetizing approach. You can read the full story at Wired.com.

Basically, YouTube keeps a database of all of its music and video uploads, separating the audio and visual files. These files have something of a fingerprint which enables ContentID to identify duplicates in its database, even though duplicate files may be coded differently. When a duplicate is identified, like Chris Brown's "Forever" appearing in that stupid catchy wedding video...

...YouTube has the option to either remove the infringing material or divert some of the ad revenue generated by the infringing material to the copyright holder. In the event that YouTube diverts a portion of the ad revenue to the copyright holder, it may also provide links on the video to purchase copyrighted material from services like Amazon or iTunes. The option to delete or monetize is decided by information uploaded in those same databases from the copyright holders. Many major and independent labels have decided to monetize with YouTube using this technology. In this way, Chris Brown "doubled his fun" (f'in sell out).

In a way, it's good news for folks like you an me. Publishing videos with copyrighted tracks may not be such a liability anymore. Assuming such activity exposes you to suit (and isn't protected by fair use or transformative doctrines), you can avoid a lot of legal hassle this way. But you can't help but ask whether the pendulum has swung too far in favor of the copyright holder. I mean, Chris Brown's track had laid pretty dormant for about a year before its reappearance in JK' Wedding. After it's reappearance, it shot up to #4 on iTunes' and #3 on Amazon's best-selling mp3 lists.

And through no effort of his own.

In any case, the approach represents a practical appreciation on the part of larger scale music producers for the value that online service providers (ahem, and content providers) can provide. An appreciation not entirely new in American thought.

"He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me. That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density at any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation."

Thomas Jefferson, in Writings of Thomas Jefferson, vol. 6, H.A. Washington, Ed.,1854, pp. 180-181.