I’ve just looked it up and it is 320 by 240 pixels and runs at 25 frames per second. The maximum data rate is 300kbit/s
NTSC and PAL are effectively 720x480/576 so this is less than Standard TV quality not exactly home cinema …?
Perhaps they just haven’t moved into the domain of the RIAA yet. If they take a step or two that way, they’ll have more lawsuits than they can shake a stick at.
There’s a great video explaining copyright law, ironically enough on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CJn_jC4FNDo
Hey Now Jeff!
This is so true, I’ve heard Howard Stern talk about this so often there sure is a lot of hypocrisy from YouTube here.
Coding Horror Fan,
Catto
Theres also that whole abysmal “vlog” scene where people practically dictate their diaries in front of a webcam.
It’s a simple case of the ‘golden rule’. Those who have the gold make the rules. Have you taken a look at how much google is worth right now? Like I said, the golden rule and gold rules…
Now, they don’t even care if one tells them another user has uploaded a whole technical video in small portions which is copyrighted and for it’s specific use fairly expensive.
When I notified them of publishing copyrighted content they wrote back telling me that I am not the owner of the copyright or his representative and therefore they will not care about it…
So much for them. Why I like the idea of their platform I do not like their views and therefore use other platforms for video sharing.
My YouTube account contains 100% me-generated content. what does yours contain? i know quite a few people who use youtube to “broadcast yourself” so there.
“When I notified them of publishing copyrighted content they wrote back telling me that I am not the owner of the copyright or his representative and therefore they will not care about it…”
They do not care because you cannot sue them, if they get a takedown notice from the copyright holder they will remove the video without asking any questions… hence the case of one YouTuber who shot a home video, sent it to a TV program, they showed it, he put the clip from the TV show on YouTube, they sent a takedown notice to YouTube, YouTube removed the video.
Daniel:
I’m not surprised that Youtube ignores it. US Copyright Law, as amended by the Digital Millenium Copyright Act, protects them from being sued as long as they take down content when presented with a properly filled out DMCA takedown form.
From what I’ve heard, what Goran said about editorial actions in Europe applies in the US. As soon as a site starts taking editorial actions, they can be held accountable for any they fail to remove, as they have willfully preempted their DMCA safe harbor rights.
Definitely mixed feelings about YouTube for me. To an amazing degree, it has realized the potential to find any thinkable fragment of video – and I think sometimes the 2-5 minute excerpt is not only the most convenient form of consumption but also a better form altogether. Entertainment value can transcend “size,” at least in this arena, and I believe that people will come back to the low-quality version of that one SNL sketch that was funny versus watching the whole show in high-definition.
From a content producer’s perspective however, it seems like we’ve traded a distribution problem for an “attribution” problem. A phenomenon I’ve seen repeatedly is multiple YouTube accounts posting the same clip with little or no modifications. Or re-encoding a non-YouTube video and posting it there. So now in many cases it isn’t so much getting people to see one’s work as much as it is trying to convince people that one is the original producer of that work. Or creating a large enough incentive for people to go somewhere besides YouTube for video or video-related material.
Consumers of the clips don’t care, of course.
Was this just your way to link to some funny stuff on You Tube? 
No one can fight Google, which is why it was a smart thing for the founders to sell, as they would have run afoul of the law.
Google is embedded into, and part of, the “club” of the NWO.
First off, I hate the flash player. I like the Divx site much better. Second, to answer your question, most of the content I watch has been uploaded by the owner/author. I very seldom watch anything that I could watch on TV or DVD simply due to the quality.
The state of copyright right now is abysmal. Do you remember why folks thought copyright could be useful? The right of restricting copying large integer numbers?
Well, copyright could be abolished, and we all would be better off for it.
That’s what YouTube is trying to tell you.
What does this have to do with coding?
YouTube is like Napster, just a provider of a service. The people uploading the content are the ones that don’t understand the law, and break the law. You can’t hold CodingHorror responsible for this comment if I submitted it with copyrighted content and it stayed up for 30 minutes. Would YouTube exist without copyrighted content? Sure, look at all the independent artists now. It may not be as popular, but it would exist.
On the whole subject of copyright, here’s a great summary of the current problem: http://www.news.com/8301-13578_3-9792175-38.html?tag=nefd.pulse. McCullagh’s point is that copyright law has been drastically distorted by special interests.
We’ve got a huge disconnect between the law and technology, where copyright holders are attempting to substitute legal barriers for now non-existent technical barriers. And while they’re at it, they’re trying to redefine the nature of copyright from a limited right granted to the producer of “content” into a limited right granted to the consumer, i.e. the public. It won’t work, the only question is how much damage gets done in the meantime.
“I wonder why other people and companies don’t get the free ride from the hyper-litigious entertainment industry that YouTube seems to enjoy.”
Because all the corporate copyright lawyers are too busy looking for “unfrozen caveman lawyer” skits on YouTube.
But I still dislike YouTube’s massive hypocrisy in this area, and I wonder why other people and companies don’t get the free ride from the hyper-litigious entertainment industry that YouTube seems to enjoy.
Hmmm… is that the problem? What do you mean by “free ride”? Most of the changes in YouTube were driven by the legal issues. My humble opinion is that they do not sell out their users: they comply with the law but do their best not to cripple the system in the process.
It’s impossible to have humans approving each upload, not to mention you become vulnerable to a special kind of DoS attack: a competitor could hire people to submit copyrighted material over and over again with tiny changes, so humans are required and the time until the user’s real content gets approved rises beyond acceptable.
By the way, Flickr uses the same principle. There are a few successful services that deal constantly with copyright violations and do it well. The law sucks, but it’s clear in respect to what constitutes promotion of piracy (Napster) and what isn’t. In this big lie, who’s being lied to?