Adverts Mysteriously Appended to YouTube Clips

hey0you0guy writes "For the past few months copyrighted clips of shows have been edited to include advertisements for Gawker Media. These clips have been uploaded to the video sharing site YouTube by a user going by the handle Belowtheradar. These clips are then being linked to by Gawker itself: 'Gawker.com, for example, on Thursday featured a YouTube clip from ABC's talk show The View. At the beginning of the video, there is an ad for Gawker. On Wednesday, Valleywag posted a link to a video of television satirist Stephen Colbert talking about Wikipedia. At the beginning of that video there is an ad for Valleywag, a blog dedicated to Silicon Valley gossip.' CNet contacted the copyright holders for the videos (which range from NBC to Apple), and mostly received responses of 'we're looking into it.' At least two groups did confirm they did not give permission for this kind of advertisement."

Legal fees

[t00le]

We all know they have to come up with an interesting way to pay for all of the copyright lawsuits that are forthcoming.

Will only get worse

[daeg]

The problem will only get worse as (a) YouTube starts paying users to upload content (b) users keep uploading unauthorized copies of shows and (c) YouTube starts needing to generate profits and adds more advertisements such as pre- and post-stream ads.

Why is this a problem? Now, instead of simply a DMCA takedown notice, YouTube is far more liable for damages because they made a direct profit off of the usage of unauthorized content. The users are more liable, too, since they will make a profit from YouTube.

Like YouTube at the Micro Level

[N8F8]

Playing Devil's advocate I'd say this is a smaller scale version of what YouTube itself did. YouTube advertised itself with "borrowed" content to become famous and increase net value.

A couple of things...

[Evro]

1) Where's the "mysterious" part? Someone's putting ads into the clip before uploading them. Nothing "mysterious."

2) Appending means they're being tacked onto the end. If they're being added at the beginning, they're being prepended. Next time save the embarrassment and just say "added."

Re:Read the terms, please

[Anonymous Coward]

This is not what is happening here. Someone submitted a clip WITH an ad, knowing that as long as the combination of the two was still worth watching, people would watch it (and see the ad).

Common practice, unlikely ...

[Ace905]

I think on the one hand, Gawker Media has gotten a *lot* of publicity from this - particularly after being discovered. Every news story on the incident has a link to their web page. But on the other hand, they now face a barrage of legal battles after admitting publicly that the uploader (belowtheradar) is '[their] video guy...'.

I doubt anybody will follow in their footsteps once the courts make an example of them, and that is very likely to happen.

In related news, The halfwit blowhard Amanda Congdon [10zenmonkeys.com] managed to get her little 'quote' of disdain in to the news article above ; so it's official, every worthless media-wh0&e not worth watching has gotten their 15 minutes of fame. Way to push the story.

---
speaking of 15 minutes of fame [douginadress.com].

it's called the tragedy of the commons

[circletimessquare]

99 out of 100 people can be well behaved, but it takes only one asshat to stink up the whole place and make the experience miserable for everyone and ruin a forum's value or attract unwanted attention

newsgroups, email, many news aggregator sites (not slashdot, thankfully): all it takes is 1 or 2 committed asshats to ruin the fun for everyone else. usually advertising and spam. they see their own aggrandizement at the sake of everyone else's misery, and they choose to make everyone else miserable for the sake of something selfish and smammler in importance

it's predictable and inevitable that any utopian scheme that relies on everyone to behave nicely will fail. there's always one a**hole who will act like an a**hole. it's pretty much guaranteed. human nature is what it is. there's no vhanging or getting around it's good, it's bad, and it's ugly

you forgot the rest...

[Mister Whirly]

"' CNet contacted the copyright holders for the videos (which range from NBC to Apple), and mostly received responses of 'we're looking into it.' At least two groups did confirm they did not give permission for this kind of advertisement."

The two groups went on to say "And we are kicking ourselves for not thinking of it first!"

Re:Like YouTube at the Micro Level

[MeanderingMind]

I disagree. There is a fundamental difference here between what Youtube does and what the sleazy advertiser is doing.

Youtube accepts videos from people, and posts them to their website which features ads.

The sleazy advertiser is taking someone else's content, adding an advertisement into the content itself without permission, and reposting it.

While both involve advertisement, Youtube doesn't claim they'll post your video to an ad-free website, and they certainly don't steal your videos off your hard drive without asking. It's a WYSIWYG situation, anyone who uses Youtube knows the webpage has ads. The sleaze, on the other hand, is presenting these videos as something they're not.

Re:it's called the tragedy of the commons

[jfengel]

Slashdot isn't a commons, at least not in its news articles. They're picked by editors. Those editors fail in a lot of ways (dups, slashvertisements, crappy grammar), but as you observe they keep up a reasonably interesting stream of articles.

The comments are a commons, it's interesting that it's not too bad. One still sees occasional trolls, but several mechanisms weed them out: moderation, ignoring ACs, and Slashdot's filters. Eliminating graphical content helps, too.

I'm still surprised that you don't find groups of trolls banding together to subvert that. It wouldn't be hard for several to make a few intelligent comments, acquire karma, and then burn it all to moderate an ascii-art goatse image to +5. Presumably this doesn't happen because there are too many real moderators pushing such idiocies down; the wealth of mod points is on their side.

Wikipedia, too, is a commons where a combination of benign dictatorship (locking down controversial articles, banning troll users and unregistered users from some articles) and the general good-will to hide the trolls works to make the commons quite liveable.

That doesn't work for most physical commons. Modding down a troll is cheap; cleaning up a polluted river or the air is expensive, and not amenable to many people putting in a little work.

Re:New spam?

[Rob T Firefly]

But isn't this the first instance of someone advertising on ANOTHER person's content?

Nowhere near. Geocities and the like were doing it in the early days of the web.