Why I will no longer post to YouTube

[marko_the_rat]

Last night I left my computer uploading a new Rattus video to YouTube, one I'd been working on since December last year and my first HD video of Rattus. Because I didn't want to give the copyright trolls any gristle to work with, I took care to only use music released under Creative Commons and to abide by any CC licensing requirements. But when I checked it this morning I found YouTube had content ID matched part (or all) of the soundtrack to Rumblefish. At first I thought YouTube's automated content matcher had made a mistake and I disputed the claim, but Harvard showed me different. Rumblefish was supposed to be a service letting small indie creators like myself add copyrighted music to their videos at a nominal cost, but they have been adding Creative Commons music to their catalogue which YouTube then picks up and overlays advertising on otherwise royalty-free videos to pay rumblefish's royalties (and no doubt claim a share of the advertising revenue themselves). This is the last straw. I will not be party to letting a third party make revenue from other creators' work without paying anything back or value adding in any way. Better creators than me have already deserted YouTube and I know I will not be the last. How many do they need to lose until they care? Google have a delicate balancing act to play with copyright holders, but in this case they slipped and missed the net. Creators release their work under Creative Commons for a reason: so it can be distributed as widely as possible. Rumblefish, whether intentionally or not, is restricting that without paying anything back.

In future, the most I will upload to YouTube are teasers directing viewers to my Vimeo account.

Comments

[marko-the-rat.livejournal.com]

I'll be posting to Vimeo instead, but they won't let me upload in as high quality as YT will. I think Vimeo are still guilty of using flash, but they support HTML5 as well. What other sites are you thinking of? DailyMotion won't support HD so they're out.

[harvardheinous.livejournal.com]

O_o   wha??   Vimeo is very iOS-friendly (i.e. not Flash-centric)... a Vimeo PLUS account is what you want, Ratso!

[marko-the-rat.livejournal.com]

I never said it wasn't! But when I go there it still uses Flash by default. Why do I want a Vimeo Plus account?

[harvardheinous.livejournal.com]

> Why do I want a Vimeo Plus account?

Higher-quality encoding.

[marko-the-rat.livejournal.com]

The higher quality encoding version would stay up even after my Vimeo Plus subscription expires, right? The FAQ didn't seem clear on that point. This is my first HD video, so higher quality encoding would be appealing. Also, I had to make compromises in video quality at my end to make it fit in the 500MB limit. I don't do these big uploads very often; I might be better off subscribing for a month when I'm ready to release a new video.

[harvardheinous.livejournal.com]

You may be onto something there.