A note about YouTube

[Phade]

Hey All,

From the day I first visited YouTube, I knew it was going to be bad for the AMV community. Since then, I have been quietly but fervently opposed to YouTube, going so far as to disallow links to the site and blur out their name here on the forum. Little did I know just how bad YouTube was going make it for us, the AMV community.

The AMV community has survived so far by trying to be as cool as possible to both the fans of AMVs as well as those who ultimately own the source materials we all use in our AMVs. This site has tried its best to be as positive towards industry by encouraging legitimate sourcing, keeping a low profile, and general self-policing in the hopes that we will be allowed to do what we do.

YouTube, on the other hand, is a general free-for-all land of video. Anyone with anything video can put it up there with no checks, balances, or core community trying to keep things that are potentially “uncool” as cool as possible with the ones who have the big sticks to potentially beat us (AMVs) down. Knowing their policies, I knew from the start that YouTube was going to cause a good deal of unwanted problems with the music industry by having AMVs and other music videos show up in a very public, uncontrolled environment. I knew that would end badly:

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20061018-8014.html

What I didn’t expect was potential cooperation between YouTube and the music industry:

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20061009-7935.html

Once I read that news, I couldn’t decide which was worse for us: the lawsuits or the cooperation. The lawsuits are obviously bad. “But how could the cooperation be worse,” you ask? Suppose YouTube is successful in getting agreements with all major record labels to allow music videos on their site. Would record labels rather try to keep track of similar agreements with potentially hundreds or thousands of other little similar web sites that do the same(-ish) thing as YouTube, or would they rather just worry about the one site and say “no” to all others?

My guess is that they would say “no” to every other site out there. When they eventually go after the other non-YouTube video sites, they would still be able to save face simply by saying, “Hey, you video creators, it’s not that we don’t like what you’re doing and all, it’s just that you have to use the approved site instead of just some random site out there. We’re not the bad guy since we’re still allowing you to do what you do (make videos), but you just have to post them where we say it’s ok.”

This would essentially mean that the Org hosting would vanish. No more decently high visual-quality videos on your computer to view whenever you want. The only way to view an AMV would be low-quality streams, no wide-screen, nothing to take home, and no core community making sure AMV credit is given where due.

Now to make things even worse for us, YouTube has forced a previously quiet player to the forefront:

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20061020-8038.html

Japanese content creators are now going through the web (starting with YouTube) and forcing the removal of anything that uses their content. Anyone around here know of a cool site that specializes in making Japanese-based video content available on the web? :-\

From the day I started this site, I and everyone else involved knew the days of AMVs were numbered. We knew of all the possible outcomes with AMVs on the web, the most likely was that we would eventually be taken down. I believe that we as a community have done everything that we could to keep AMVs around as long as possible. We have been surprised how long it has lasted so far. Ultimately, though, I knew that the most likely person to bring down AMVs would not be someone within the community, but would be someone outside the AMV community.

So as I expected, YouTube has caused the adversaries of the AMV community go grow and become more active. As far as I can see, YouTube has done nothing to preserve the AMV community and is likely to inadvertently ultimately cause our demise. The time of AMVs as we know it has now become much shorter and we all have YouTube to thank.

However, even given all that is transpiring, this site will still continue to do its best to preserve the AMV community as best as we can. For now, we can only hope for a miracle that we are somehow overlooked through these very troubling times.

Phade.

[Moonlight Soldier]

I don't think its fair to blame youtube for "the demise" of the AMV community.

Granted, it is a similar and lower-quality competitor, but it operates on the same sort of policy as the org. When copyright holders choose to or have to acknowledge their rights are being infringed upon, they make their case.

The same happened with that record label that made the org remove the Evanescence and Creed videos. It's just that in comparison, youtube turns it up a notch.

Youtube seems to be a catalyst for copyright infringements' discussion and reprehension but, the amv community does not have legal rights to what is hosted anymore than youtube. [In most cases.]

All it means it that a possible termination of such sites comes sooner rather than later.

At least it's provoking discussion though.

And as onerous as it might seem, from what I understand, a-m-v.org did not always have free hosting. So if worst comes to worst and this site is dissolved, there's nothing to stop the community from coming together again, without said bonus.

[downwithpants]

OMG EVERYBODY PANIC!!1@35$2%89

YouTube, on the other hand, is a general free-for-all land of video. Anyone with anything video can put it up there with no checks, balances, or core community trying to keep things that are potentially “uncool” as cool as possible with the ones who have the big sticks to potentially beat us (AMVs) down. Knowing their policies, I knew from the start that YouTube was going to cause a good deal of unwanted problems with the music industry by having AMVs and other music videos show up in a very public, uncontrolled environment.

to play devil's advocate:
the official stance of youtube was never to permit illegally uploading copyrighted material. they've stated in their terms of use not to do so, have allowed users to report videos that contain copyrighted material, and enforced this policy by removing reported videos. the video flagging system was some kind of a check against copyright violation, and youtube was hoping that the system would give them some defense, legal or moral, against big business. apparently the system was not strong enough legally.

the org has officially allowed copyrighted material to be uploaded. although there is no built-in site tool to do so, if someone wants material to which they own the rights to be taken off, we comply, as youtube would. to compensate for our debt to anime and music artists, we have constructed a code of ethics encouraging the uploader to legally purchase their anime/music sources.

legally, we're in as bad as if not worse position than youtube is.

ethically, do we have the right to look down upon youtube?

youtube's site policy was to prohibit any copyright violation regardless of whether you buy the source or not. the org allows you to upload copyrighted material w/o original artist permission, granted that you legally purchased your source. the difference between these two policies is that the original artists maintain control of distribution of their works under youtube, but not under the org, even though they receive revenue and the amv sources are attributed to them.

in reality, youtube was loaded with illegally uploaded copyrighted material. they offered a system to allow copyright owners to report infringing videos, but the system was impractical for the volume of infringing videos and laid an extra burden on the original artists.

well my point is: although youtube is at ethical fault for having weak provisions against restricting illegal uploads on to their site, the org doesn't have strong moral grounds to look down upon youtube. this isn't to say we don't have reason to be bothered or worried by youtube, as it is the site that is bringing a lot of attention from big business to site-hosted copyrighted media.

[rubyeye]

I just caught a really interesting documentary last night on PBS called The NET @ RISK by journalist Bill Moyers, about the fight for "Net Neutrality". This latest attack on AMVs feels like an Early Warning Sign that the fight is going badly.

So much for the new email address @ animemusicvideos.org. If the site every goes down, what's the point of using it?

[trythil]

OMG EVERYBODY PANIC!!1@35$2%89

Yeah, I actually agree with Phade on this. That's probably reason enough to start panicking.

My agreement is not based along any sort of moral, ethical, or legal comparison. (I don't think Phade's argument relies on any of those grounds, either, but I can't really tell.)

Hyperbolic summary:
YouTube has joined the enemy, and must be treated as such.

Detail:
YouTube's initial popularity may not have been all that bad. Though this site got its share of media attention, as well as one potentially helpful contact in one Dr. Lawrence Lessig, YouTube's level of media exposure is huge. This site just can't compare.

That may have acted as a lens of sorts, focusing lawyers' attentions onto one Web site as opposed to a random sampling of many different Web sites as well as the names of dead people.

But now, YouTube has forged alliances with media moguls. (Side note: I'll call them GoogTube from now on. It's probably more appropriate.)

GoogTube is dangerous for four reasons. I'll list two here:

(1) They had (have) strong links to this copyright underground. Here is an example.
(2) They have gained some sense of legitimacy with Big Media.

Now, an anecdote or two.

The Business Software Alliance offered a carrot of 20,000 pounds to employees to turn over their employers if they suspected illegally obtained software to be in use. A more emotionally-charged example can be found in Sen. Joe McCarthy's Communist witch-hunt in the 1950s, when he asked people to report their friends, neighbors and family members if they suspected them of being Communists. (Or else.)

This scenario could very easily happen again. Actually, I can't see a reason for it to not occur. Large media conglomerates have repeatedly demonstrated that they are very interested in total control over their copyright.

Of course, that's their right, yadda yadda yadda. Anyway, I don't think it's too far off that GoogTube will be used as a precision instrument of takedown.

Why wouldn't they just say no? The carrot and stick deal I wrote about above. Actually, they're also reasons #3 and #4 why GoogTube is dangerous:

(3) GoogTube is getting a lot of good stuff from these deals: content, cash, and cred. If they prove that they'll play nice with Big Media, they'll get more out of it.
(4) GoogTube will lose a lot of money if they refuse to cooperate with their new friends. Heck, they might even get in deep trouble.

(3) and (4) combined with (1) and (2) results in a situation which is still somewhat unclear. However, I don't think it can possibly be any good for these little bits of illegal art we like to make every now and then, unless (1) Big Media does something totally, uncharacteristically insane and legitimizes the .org with no strings attached, (2) we start exclusively using material under appropriate licenses (say, Creative Commons BY-NC-SA or public domain stuff), (3) an equally ridiculously unlikely shift occurs in the structure of traditional copyright and Creative Commons' ideas supplants traditional copyright law in the next six months, or (4) GoogTube owners grow really huge metaphorical balls. I mean, these things have to be big enough to weather not only the loss of large sacks of cash, but also the potential to get sacked with large lawsuits. We're talking galaxy-sized balls here, man.

I haven't calculated the probabilities for any of those scenarios occurring, but something tells me that they're all around the magnitude of the Planck constant.

If you think that's pessimistic, give me some reasons why GoogTube wouldn't be used in this manner. It is extremely easy to search GoogTube, and often just about as easy to trace the source of an infringing creation (with, say, Google).

If you were maniacal about maintaining control over your copyright (and I bet most of you are; you just don't know it yet) and had powerful search and communication tools that would allow you to locate infringers and mass-mail them takedown notices in the matter of an hour or two, why would you not do it? It's not like you'll be losing money; there's plenty of people out there who don't give a damn about those weird "artists" and their "art". They'll happily keep your company afloat while you're tossing legal threats around left and right. And, really, money is the bottom line.

Finally, I accept that a-m-v.org has been a greatly positive influence on the AMV community. It's encouraged growth of the community in a ton of ways, and even lets us do cool things like talk to each other, via this board and other channels of communication. I know I've made some 70-80 friends by first finding them here, talking to them in other places, and finally meeting them at anime conventions. The downfall of this site would be quite a blow to the community. It will undoubtedly not kill it, but it wouldn't exactly zero out.

So, that's why I agree with Phade. Feel free to rip into it.

[TaranT]

Japan Too, YouTube? - Newsweek

Youtube, the booming American Web site where surfers share short videos, is taking off in Japan, too. The number of Japanese visitors per month has more than quadrupled to 6.4 million since February, an unprecedented success for an English-language Web site.

[Vlad G Pohnert]

I don't think it means it's the end of this site completely. Yes, downloads of videos might not be possible, but it that's all the org is to everyone,.. If so, it's a sad state.

I have to agree with what was said, this is not just a download service, but a community where people can share common interests, coordinate meeting at cons, catalog their videos and provide insight into what they created for each entry...

This is the way the org was before the golden doughnut and if taking the video means the site disappears due to lack of interest, then it was not much of a community to begin with...

Vlad

[Keeper of Hellfire]

Would record labels rather try to keep track of similar agreements with potentially hundreds or thousands of other little similar web sites that do the same(-ish) thing as YouTube, or would they rather just worry about the one site and say “no” to all others?

My guess is that they would say “no” to every other site out there.

I think that is too pessimistic. Record labels (like any industry) are interested in making as much money as possible with their products. So if there's a chance to make more license agreements they'll do it. So the question isn't to me if they'd make similar agreements with other sites. It's the question if others sites can pay the license fees. And for smaller sites or non-commercial sites like the org the answer will most likely be "NO".

And that it was before either. So I don't see much difference in the situation before and now. What has changed, and that's a bit positive: Before it was necessary to license every single item. Now you can make a generell license, which allows you to host anything from that labels, including titles that weren't even released at the time the agreement was made.

[Otohiko]

You know, I'm not prone to panic, but I agree with many of the points made.

One thing that is definitely concerning is that for the past month, the Tube was consistently in the headlines, and not only because of the google takeover (not directly in regard to it, anyway).

There is simply a lot of agiotage around the issue of online video thanks to that site - it's what the mp3 issue was a few years ago, a big 'controversy point' for all.

Note by the way that for all the efforts, if anything - [illegal] mp3s are probably more rather than less available now, and we've had at least 7 years of that scandal ongoing. The distribution methods have constantly shifted, but the practice at the root of the issue is far from being dead.

There's always a chance that the .org might be zeroed in on. And a chance that it won't be. If it does get hit, the AMV community will be worse for it, but not dead for it. We'll see a rise of larger private sites, a-la The Vault, which have dozens as opposed to thousands of videos on them, but still a respectable amount. We'll probably see AMV torrents, AMV 'packs', and those other type of things. MEPs will probably get all the stronger still, because their size and prominence will be of advantage to getting out video work to a larger audience.

If it's not, and I hope it's not - Phade & co. will just have to keep navigating these risky waters. It's not an easy business, which isn't a business to start with, that's why we have to be thankful for the dedication it takes to actually keep it going!

[rubyeye]

Interesting reading here. But I also had a crazy thought: Would it be possible for Phade @ Co. to SELL a-m.v.org much the same way 'the Tube' was to Google? I don't know how a website is bought/sold that wasn't designed to generate profits in the first place. I really don't know anything about 'the Tube' other than it's a video dumping ground and definately not much of a Community as we have here - meaning I see a-m-v.org as a completely different entity.

Anyway, I have faith we will still exist, in some form or another. There is still the Conventions, remember.