 Wow, I never thought big - well to do - websites would be the ones stealing material like 13 year olds. However, that's what I found this morning when I came across a viral kitten video of mine that was deliberately ripped from my youtube account. My twitter friend @ replied to me today, asking me if the video on yahoo's front page was mine. At first, I was kinda excited, considering it had gone semi viral last week, earning about 90,000 views off good ol' youtube. I had gotten a helpful chunk of ad revenue that I really needed - so I was thrilled that maybe I could earn some more to help with the bills this month. Well, that turned out to be a big NOPE. Turns out, not only does Yahoo fail to contact video owner's that they are going to feature their content - and therefore asking permission to use it - but they go ahead and rip the video completely off the original hosting site and upload to their servers like the own they rights to it. One thing about the internet that is clearly beautiful for small content creators is the share button. We LOVE share buttons. They post the content to whatever site you like and if not, provide an embed code that directs straight from the source. Are you getting what I'm saying here? There is a SOURCE. You can't even try to find where the video came from, hosted on yahoo's page. Let me just say, as a blogger - All the content I post online is either made by me, or you can definitely click it to view the original page it was on. The videos are embedded, meaning whatever ads the video hosts, can be seen from within the embed. Yahoo, didn't do that.... In fact, they even host their OWN ad content on the page, making money off videos they do not own. I don't care if videos are being shared on websites that have ads, all I care about is that my ads are still intact. So, this leads me to the next set of events that I proceeded with. I emailed their copyright email - (who know when I'll get a reply) and posted a reply on twitter directly telling them off. Not like that'll do much, but publicly calling out companies makes me fell better. Unfortunately, it doesn't look like Google/Youtube can take care of third party copyright claims when content is not being hosted on their own site. Ah well. Hopefully I get a reply from these jerks. Yahoo gets the scumbag steve badge this week for lacking online manners. Oh, and if you were wondering. Here's the original video of MY cat Milo, playing with his reflection. |
