YouTube
YouTube Confirms Search Ads
In August, we noticed YouTube creators buying search ads on YouTube that click through to their own videos or channels. YouTube just confirmed the practice.
Type “Tina Fey†into YouTube’s search box and, along with the search results, you may find a somewhat relevant ad for the movie “W†as well as a significantly less relevant ad for the University of Phoenix. (This is a test, after all.) The “W†ad links to a trailer on YouTube for the Oliver Stone movie and the University of Phoenix ad links to that school’s YouTube channel.
For now, only a small number of advertisers is testing the new format, the latest of many that YouTube has experimented with in the past several months.
This is merely a natural progression from Google AdWords, and it’s been visible to the public for over a month now, so I’m surprised it took YouTube this long to talk about it. Time for YouTube creators to start consulting with keyword advertising gurus.
Why Copyright Law Must Change
In early February 2007, Stephanie Lenz’s 13-month-old son started dancing. Pushing a walker across her kitchen floor, Holden Lenz started moving to the distinctive beat of a song by Prince, “Let’s Go Crazy.” He had heard the song before. The beat had obviously stuck. So when Holden heard the song again, he did what any sensible 13-month-old would do — he accepted Prince’s invitation and went “crazy” to the beat. Holden’s mom grabbed her camcorder and, for 29 seconds, captured the priceless image of Holden dancing, with the barely discernible Prince playing on a CD player somewhere in the background.
Ms. Lenz wanted her mother to see the film. But you can’t easily email a movie. So she did what any citizen of the 21st century would do: She uploaded the file to YouTube and sent her relatives and friends the link. They watched the video scores of times. It was a perfect YouTube moment: a community of laughs around a homemade video, readily shared with anyone who wanted to watch.
Sometime over the next four months, however, someone from Universal Music Group also watched Holden dance. Universal manages the copyrights of Prince. It fired off a letter to YouTube demanding that it remove the unauthorized “performance” of Prince’s music. YouTube, to avoid liability itself, complied. A spokeswoman for YouTube declined to comment.
This sort of thing happens all the time today. Companies like YouTube are deluged with demands to remove material from their systems. No doubt a significant portion of those demands are fair and justified. Universal’s demand, however, was not. The quality of the recording was terrible. No one would download Ms. Lenz’s video to avoid paying Prince for his music. There was no plausible way in which Prince or Universal was being harmed by Holden Lenz.
Revisiting ideas from his TED talk last year, Creative Commons founder Lawrence Lessig posts an article in the Wall Street Journal outlining how and why copyright law must change. This is a must-read for anyone who creates and shares anything in the 21st century.
