Youtube / Googleidol.com / "intellectual property" in the media mix culture

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

Begin forwarded message:

From: Dewayne Hendricks <dewayne () warpspeed com>
Date: July 10, 2006 12:22:40 AM EDT
To: Dewayne-Net Technology List <dewayne-net () warpspeed com>
Subject: [Dewayne-Net] Youtube / Googleidol.com / "intellectual  
property" in the media mix culture
Reply-To: dewayne () warpspeed com

[Note:  This item comes from reader Thomas Leavitt.  DLH]

From: Thomas Leavitt <thomas () thomasleavitt org>
Date: July 9, 2006 8:38:30 PM PDT
To: dewayne () warpspeed com
Subject: Youtube / Googleidol.com / "intellectual property" in the  
media mix culture

Dewayne,

 My kids are obsessed with Internet video... youtube.com and (to a
lesser extent, Google Video) has made playback of Internet video a daily
occurrence... in fact, it's even drawn me in to a degree. A year ago, I
might have watched one digital video clip a week, if that... today, I've
probably watched dozens in the past month, either on my own, or after
being dragged to a computer by someone else in the family. I've been on
the 'net since 1990, and I haven't seen anything come of age and get
integrated into my daily life this fast.

 This is still clearly the wild west, when it comes to intellectual
property and opportunity... for instance, this young woman, 20 years
old, is apparently one of the top "producers" on YouTube ... her most
popular video has been seen by 1.5 million viewers (see the video of the
tv interview she posted to myspace). Talk about democratizing
media...the process of making video has been so utterly simplified, that
pretty much anyone can leverage it to become "famous" overnight. Zero
technical skills required.

 This must be a shock, too, to "professional" video producers. Given
that it takes near zero skills to gain worldwide attention.

 At the same time, I've got to wonder about how the intellectual
property aspects of this work... how far can "fair use" be stretched?
For instance, I found this young woman via this video of hers; she was
listed in the "Director Videos" section alongside an interview of Jolene
Blalock of Star Trek Enterprise fame by Tom Green - an item clearly
pulled off a TV show and hardly definable as fair use; but, is the item
below, a lipsync to a monologue from the play Chicago, "fair use"?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N0TR0Irx4Y0

It is not, in and of itself, commercial... and I doubt she made any of
her videos to be commercial, but the net result has generated enough
publicity to land her a gig doing this professionally... and certainly,
TONS of other items on YouTube are of a similar nature: kids and younger
adults lip-syncing and performing to popular tunes. Where does "parody"
end? How about Gidol / GoogleIdol http://www.googleidol.com ... are they
or the performers getting copyright clearance for the music being used?

Here's their disclaimer:

"This site <googleidol.com> is not endorsed, affiliated nor owned by
Google Inc. All videos provided have been made public by the content
owner via Google Video"

..... and the site has Google Adwords and other advertisements  
splattered
all over it... but clearly, it isn't a commercial venture, in that it is
done in the creator's spare time (see the blog entries). Is the
liability Google's (given that all the video content originates directly
from Google's web site)?

On the other hand, what these folks are doing, is exactly what advocates
for the public commons envision: remixing and reworking and
re-envisioning our common cultural fabric. 99.9% of these items are
non-commercial in intent and practice, and hardly anything which a
reasonable individual could argue represents a "loss" or "damage" to the
original copyright owner.

In fact, if you look at this blog entry, you'll see that there's a
German rock band which has clued into this phenomenon, the Sundealers,
and which is promoting itself by encouraging people to "perform" their
music in a competition sponsored by the site.

http://www.googleidol.com/blog/2006/06/sundealers-join-gidol-to- 
promote-their.html

The omnipresence of video, and its integration and inclusion of all
other forms of media (but especially sound, and other elements of
video), and the sudden mass adoption of it, really brings home the
entire question of whether our current copyright regime is really
appropriate to, not just the digital age, but the age of mass content
creation...

All sorts of questions come to mind, profound and trivial at the same
time...

Is it a copyright violation if a full / digital copy of a music track
happens to be playing in the background during some "candid camera"
video clip? This is *your* life, *your* experience, *your* memory on
film... it just happens to have a perfect digital copy of someone else's
copyrighted content. Who has primacy?

How about machinima and machinmanga - if someone uses digital avatars
from an online game or world to create a comic strip, because they can't
draw, and they don't charge for it, or earn their living from it... but
they solicit donations, and those donations wind up being non-trivial...
is that a commercial activity?

Lots to think about.

Weblog at: <http://weblog.warpspeed.com>



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