Working for Free...

YouTube is such an amazing invention. Whoever came up with a free way to post videos online for the sheer enjoyment of letting others watch them, was brilliant! I can guarantee that everyone reading this post has viewed a video on YouTube at one time or another. It is simply awesome.

Except for one thing: copyright owners.

For some reason, copyright owners seem to enjoy taking the fun out of everything! I understand that people like to get paid for their work, but if someone is just trying to express their feelings in pictures while using a moving song, what is the harm in that? None, if you ask me. Especially if they aren't making a profit on it. But time after time I come across a video where the music has been completely dubbed out and there's a message saying it was a violation of the copyright. Why not just remove the video? It seems pointless to let everyone view a silent movie. Well, unless we lived in 1922.

Anyway, as you all know, I posted a video on YouTube a couple years ago. I never got permission to use the song for this video and I was a little worried that one day I'd go to view it and it would have become one of those dreadful silent movies. I really didn't want to get in trouble for using this song without permission, but at the same time, I wanted to be able to share my love for the military with others. So I decided to post the video and see what would happen.

For two years and three months, nothing did happen.

Today I opened YouTube and not only did I notice that my video now has over one million views (yay!), I also noticed a couple other things. The first thing I noticed was that when the video starts to play, there is now an advertisement that pops up informing the viewer as to what the song is, who sings it and where they are able to purchase it. The second thing I noticed, upon clicking on the "statistics" tab (I like to do that every now and again) was that there was a message informing ME that because someone has claimed the copyright on the video the statistics can no longer be made public.

This may surprise you, but I have a couple thoughts about this:

First, YAY for the fact that my video wasn't made into a silent movie.

Second, I'm glad to know that my video is now an advertisement to purchase the song via iTunes or Amazon. I feel so good knowing that my FREE video is helping them make more money.

Third, can someone really make a claim on the copyright of the whole video, or are they really just claiming the copyright to the song? This part confuses me. But aside from that, why does that mean Joe Blow can't look to see what demographic is viewing the video? It doesn't make sense that they would block the statistics from being shown publicly simply because the song was copyrighted. Can anyone explain this to me?

Well, whoever has claimed the copyright has yet to make any contact with me. I think we should come to some kind of arrangement, like paying me thousands of dollars to use my video as their advertisement.

In the meantime, I'll just be grateful that they are at least letting me keep my video on YouTube.