2 thoughts on “Kryten on Copyright and YouTube”

  1. In my early days of youtube I made a trailer for the school play with video footage and interlaced it with a commercial song. Youtube removed the audio but left the video. It’s an interesting opinion he takes here but at the end of the day it is all driven by agreements rather than money. Bernie Ecclestone has had all the F1 footage removed – he employed a friend of mine to do it. I wonder if the it will always be copyright respected by demand?

  2. He doesn’t talk about the thorny issue of sampling, which uses the work of others to create a new work from which musicians and film-makers can make money. It seems that we have to get into the reuser’s head to explore their intention: were they using a clip from Red Dwarf to boost their own saleability and profit, or were they using it to promote Red Dwarf? The other thing that’s slightly off here is that he talks about suing the guy who’s but the best of him up on Youtube, but it is Youtube who is vulnerable to a lawsuit here, hence their heavy handed messages. We do need more flexibility about copyright, absolutely, and perhaps a legal regime that recognises moral rights rather than copyright, but in some ways creative commons licences allow content creators to set their creations free commercially with their moral rights intact. Why do so many people slap copyright onto everything they produce when their chance of making further income from it is nil?

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