I love watching YouTube. Today I watched some great Nirvana concert clippings there. My 5-year old watches complete episodes of Power Rangers Wild Force. My 7-year old has heard some of his favorite songs there.
I also love the idea of YouTube. The user-generated content, almost invariably infused with people’s own experience of copyrighted material, is the most expansive showcase for derivative works around. In Derivative Works Manifesto, I show myself a lover of this stuff.
Users of the world are presented with fresh, owned content every
day. We have the technology, the precedents, and the duty to make new
art out of this owned content—the stuff of our lives.
As an artist, I do it, too. So all’s well on that front.
The Great YouTube Ripoff is that they get all the money. All of it. Right in our faces, they take our creative labor and take all the money. Mark Cuban called this out last week. And YouTube thinks they are worth $1.5 billion dollars.
YouTube is a distributor. And I appreciate them. I use them, for free, all the time. For hosting my videos, hosting other people’s videos on my sites, and so on. They deserve lots. But they don’t deserve everything. Here’s the missing feature on YouTube:
Derivators should ackowledge the original content and the content owner should get paid if and when revenue is generated by the derivative work. Basically, a technical system that coupled the blog TrackBack feature with PayPal would cut it.
All sorts of sites already do this (revenue sharing with registered users) using Google Adwords. We have the technology. We just need the will from all the right places.