YouTube’s Anti-YouTube Move …

.. gives new meaning to the "You" in YouTube.

As in "You" actually means "Our".

Via Blogaholics, here’s an interpretation of YouTube’s recent announcement.  I suspect that many bloggers will take similar action.

Goodbye YouTube

YouTube has changed their terms and conditions to include the following:

"…you hereby grant YouTube a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free, sublicenseable and transferable license to use, reproduce, distribute, prepare derivative works of, display, and perform the User Submissions in connection with the YouTube Website and YouTube’s (and its successor’s) business, including without limitation for promoting and redistributing part or all of the YouTube Website (and derivative works thereof) in any media formats and through any media channels…"

Which basically means that they can do whatever they want with the content you upload to their service and they can make money from it. And because it is a tranferable license, they can give your content to anyone else to do whatever they want with it. And if tomorrow some big media company buys YouTube they will have the same rights to your content. You loose all control over how your submissions are used.

I think a lot of people are missing the point when they say that the terms also say "The foregoing license granted by you terminates once you remove or delete a User Submission from the YouTube Website." or that you have to give YouTube the right to distribute your content anyway if people want to see it on their site. The point here is that now YouTube can make money from, and let anyone else they want make money from, your content, without having to ask you first.

I don’t mind sharing my video and my pictures. I don’t mind other people using and remixing what I create. If you look at my Flickr pictures they are all licensed with an Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike Creative Commons license that permits it. But I do not want other people to make money from it without asking me first.

So I’m deleting everything I have on YouTube.

Other posts on this: here, here, here

Update: Oh, and notice that they don’t exclude your private videos from this.

BTW, a similar move by MySpace led Billy Bragg to remove all his music from MySpace.

I also suspect that means that YouTube is further positioning itself for acquisition by CBS or NBC or CNN .. or something like that.

Tags: youtube, video, rights, license, terms of service, goodbye

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