Copyright School. Not a fun time…
This week, I learned to hate YouTube. I did not mean to end up hating YouTube, it just happened. After uploading two of this week’s videos and getting copyright violation notices, which I then fought due to Fair Use, I logged into YouTube to discover I had been sent to YouTube’s Copyright School.
Copyright school involves watching an obnoxious Happy Tree Friends video about copyright and answering some questions about the video. This needs to be done to continue to use your YouTube account.
Honestly, I found it to be bullshit and a waste of time and have since started hosting most of my videos on Vimeo
Can’t hold us puppets from bellekid on Vimeo.
The video that caused the most trouble was my mashup of Can’t Hold Us Down by Macklemore and Ryan Lewis f/Ray Dalton and NPH & JOE MANGANIELLO crash DAVID BURTKA’S DREAM BUMP – Neil’s Puppet Dreams.
Soon after putting it on YouTube, I got hit with automated copyright violation notices. I appealed them but was quickly shot down and told to remove my work.
The Rebirth of Owen Harper from bellekid on Vimeo.
Because of this, I uploaded my second video this week, The Rebirth of Owen Harper: An exploration of the Silent Era straight onto Vimeo. I had no issues uploading it and actually really enjoyed making it.
My Chaplin Foley Remix also received copyright issues from YouTube but it was thankfully not removed, something that I heard many others also had issues with.
The only thing that YouTube did not have an issue with this week was my Girls Who Kick Ass assignment. Perhaps it was because my clips from various other media were each less than 5 seconds in length that it could not detect any issues with what I had been doing.
Overall this week, I learned that Fair Use is not always followed in practice and YouTube takes down things randomly for Copyright. From now on, If I plan to upload videos to the interwebs, they will most likely be uploaded to Vimeo instead of YouTube.
