Wednesday 30 November 2011

YouTube - High handed and not customer focused and discriminating against small artists

I'm not at all impressed with YouTube. My band made this video of a track written and performed by the Band


We own the copyright to the song and the video. We recently took advantage of the ability to monetize the video, by adding Google Adwords to it. Whilst this is unlikely to bring in more than a bit of pocket money at the moment, in these hard times, every little helps.

Today I got this email :-
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YouTube Help Centre | email options | report spam

Dear RogTex,

Thanks for submitting your video Put me in the Spotlight - Koni with The False Dots Official Video for revenue sharing. We have disabled revenue sharing on this video for one of the following reasons:
  • You have not provided adequate documentation that you have the necessary rights to use all the video material and music commercially or
  • We have determined that the content is not advertiser-friendly.
Note that YouTube might disable revenue sharing for accounts that have repeatedly not been able to prove commercial usage rights for videos submitted for revenue sharing. If you would like to disable revenue sharing on your videos you may opt them out by logging in to your YouTube account and visiting http://www.youtube.com/my_videos.
If you have additional questions, please visit our Help Centre at http://www.google.com/support/youtube/.
Thanks for your understanding,
The YouTube Team
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Now this is clearly a device to stop Youtube being prosecuted for copyright violation. The stuff about the video not being advertiser friendly is purely a smokescreen. What annoys me is that I own the copyright and there is no mechanism for appealing this decision.  This policy clearly is high prejudicial against independent and unsigned artists. I can understand that YouTube doesn't make a fortune from such things generally, but just suppose the clip goes viral and starts attracting masses of hits? Us as the artist will lose out big time.

I have no objection to a suspension, or a request for further information, but I have a big objection to an arbitary decision to prevent me from earning money from a piece of artwork of which I am the copyright holder.  As to the "Thank You for Your Understanding" - as far as I'm concerned, I have no understanding at all for how such a rich corporation can be so high handed and treat it's customers so shioddily. You Tube are a bunch of pisstakers.

1 comment:

Joe Baker said...

Hi Roger - sorry to hear of your PC. As you probably know, most men die with PC, not of it! I urge you to look at these links. Dr John McDougall is a wonderful guy - he's a best-selling author and runs a live-in health centre in California. Most of his fans - like me! - have been helped enormously with heart-related issues. However, his approach is equally valid for common cancers, diabetes and the various auto-immune diseases like MS. Fortunately, you can learn everything you need to know for free from his wonderful website! I hope that after checking these links out you'll feel much better about the future. Incidentally Roger, he is usually very prompt replying to any email you might send him.

www.YouTube.com/watch?v=1ErHVXB7Ff0

http://www.drmcdougall.com/med_hot_prostatecancer.html

Happy New Year

Best Wishes

Joe Baker