We are writing the year 2009 now. It’s a good moment to reflect and take measures to adapt the contents and efforts of the team of the Music Video Guide to the new knowledge of the video guide publishing situation.
To be less cryptic: we will look more into new music and video content sites and blogs, apart from youtube which has been our main focus of interest and representations in the first few months of our blog, but has evidenced some system failures that affect the external descriptions of youtube. The Music Video Guide wants to help people to navigate through the huge amount of video clips published daily in the internet. Youtube however doesn’t provide stable urls of the their video content and begins to show signs of irrational inconsistency: while offering by default an embed link for all published videos, which can only mean that the video was published with the desire to show it to as many people as possible, allowing others to include the youtube-content on their own websites. However, in this short period of existence, the Music Video Guide has experienced several losses of time and labour invested in video reviews due to sudden ‘unavailability’ of the originally flawless integrated video clip from the youtube site into the Music Video Guide. We will even open up a new category named ‘useless video clips’.
On the other hand, the Music Video Guide will dig into audio documents and look for material to publish and comment on.
Are Video Blogs Going to Stay Alive or Will Copyright Infringement Claims Kill File Sharing on Youtube?
This post will deal about publishing, republishing and copyright. Due to recent limitations of youtube video insertion into our posts, it has become a necessity to post about this issue even though it is slightly off topic regarding the central purpose of this blog which is to contribute to the presentation of the variety of music beyond the standardized music played by the vast majority of tv and radio stations around the globe.
Youtube has developed into an important communication channel with a lot of videos posted daily by users from many countries and regions of the world. Here internet surfers will find a huge archieve of video clips about many issues and a considerable part of these videos deal with music and musicians beside other aspects of the entertainment business and other fields of interest.
The Music Video Guide was created with the idea to help people navigate this immense quantity of videos published and republished on youtube and other video blog platforms and other internet sites. Our purpose was and is to publish or republish a video clip and comment it so that the reader could have a point of departure for the personal evaluation or the corresponding music video and we were very disappointed when about 10 minutes after publishing our post about an interpretation of ‘Der Hölle Rache’ from ‘The Magic Flute’ (‘Die Zauberflöte’) by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, the video didn’t show up any more on our blog. Instead there was a short line saying something like ‘Sorry, this video is no longer available’. We inmediately visited the youtube site to learn that in the text fiel which usually contains the code for embedding the video into blogs and other websites there was this laconic line of text: “video insertion disabled by petition”.
This ment a lot of frustration to us. We believe that things like that should not happen and are avoidable. For example if the youtube system would offer the possibility to disable the video embedding at and let’s say within the next 15 minutes after publishing time. Then we could save our efforts of investigating and commenting and focus on other videos whose publishers or republishers aren’t governed by envy or greed but by the sane intention to bring good stuff to the general public’s attention.
Anyway, the Music Video Guide continued with it’s publishing scheme of a video with the corresponding comments and everything went fine for a while until our last post which was about the first movement of the Cello Sonata No. 3 in A major, Op. 69, by Ludwig van Beethoven performed by the marvellous piano player Glenn Gould and the cellist Leonard Rose and recorded around 1960. This time it took only a day to see that the republisher of this video clip had solicited the disallowment of embedding of the clip into other sites.
The preceding lines are about the why of this post, now let’s get into substance.
According to the republisher of this video on youtube, it is extracted from “The Glenn Gould Collection: VOLUME 8 – Interweaving Voices” (Sony SHV 48412, VHS, NTSC). We are strongly convinced that this youtube publisher didn’t upload the video on behalf of Sony who seems to be the copyright holder, as far as we can deduce from the information provided and will do a little research about the authorisation for uploading on youtube, among some other actions related to this incident.
The easiest thing would be to download this video from youtube which is very easy if you have installed Realplayer or other similar software and then upload it on our own account so that we could embed it pointing to our own upload.
However, at uploading time youtube show a copyright notice, telling you to not upload anything which isn’t your work or public domain. Now, we could edit the video a little bit, to comply with the rule of utilization of only a certain percentage of original material and make it “ours”. Or we could argue that since the mentioned video only represents the first movemento of three of the Cello Sonata No. 3, this is already sliced down to comply with this kind of rule (note: correction subject to detail investigation regarding varying national and international legislations).
But maybe, the youtube republisher (http://www.youtube.com/user/inwit) considers that this video clip is already reduced in size and quality in comparison with the original Sony VHS tape and that this fact is enough to not infringe the rights of copyright holder Sony. We will find out and would appreciate your comments regarding the issue.
Music and Video Guide 