feversmile

Rights grab

Znet is reporting in their article “Web sites out of tune with musicians’ rights” how YouTube basically is grabbing the rights of artist’s works as soon as content is uploaded to their site. As stated,

YouTube takes a different tack. It claims a “worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free, sublicenseable and transferable license” to content uploaded on its site “to use, reproduce, distribute, prepare derivative works of, display and perform” for any purpose as long as it is a business interest of it or one of its affiliates.

This is very dangerous, it basically means if you or a musician or movie maker uploads content to their site, YouTube (i.e. Google) has the right to make money and use your work to make money. Granted, they already make money from it in the form of advertising on the site. But the rights grab they are claiming allows them to directly sell the work(s) to TV shows, movies, whatever and you have no rights to say differently. While people get alot of exposure placing videos on YouTube, is it worth the potential to loose rights to your work and someone else to make money from your hard work with nothing in return?

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 21st, 2007 at 3:20 pm. It is filed under music. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.