Johnsatyricon

Recently, one of my Dailymotion accounts has been suspended for infringment of copyright law, by using a soundtrack that is copyright protected. I lost all my material, that had been visited for 300.000 times, many subscriptions to my channel by visitors and a strong 'brand'. It takes months, not to say years to rebuild all this.

Of course I do not protest against the right of video hosting services to remove copyright protected material. But I do protest against the manner by which this is done. Disabling an account without prior warning is a painful experience, it is as being treated as a criminal.

Due to the video revolution on the web -the word revolution is hardly an overstatement- amateurs all over the world have the opportunity to upload videos and share experiences. This is fun and when you start doing this, you have the feeling of illimited possibilities. But when you grow more experienced, you will encounter more and more problems with copyright.

I do not have a camcorder to make my own videos. It is still a huge investment for my limited budget (ca. 250 euro or 350 dollar). So I cannot but bring existing material, that may be copyright protected.

Of course I have read the terms of use of video hosting services like Youtube and Dailymotion, that sanction infringment of copyright. But as an amateur you look more to what kind of videos are present on the fora. Besides videos made by amateurs -where there is no copyright problem- , you see lots of ripped fragments of dvd 's, bits and pieces of television programs, and remixed trailers of movies.

Especially in the case of Dailymotion, it is very hard for an amateur to understand what is possible and what is not possible. Some content causes no problems, while other videos are removed. This is very frustrating, because you have the feeling that this happens at random.

In the case of Youtube, I have so far not had any serious problems, with the exception of a video that was removed for being too sexy ("inappropriate content").

Because the problem of intellectual rights on the web is a very difficult and frustrating subject for an amateur, I started getting interested in this matter.

To illustrate the subject, I have selected three videos I found on Youtube that deal with the problem of copyright. I hope they wil be very informative and give you an impression of the difficulty of the subject.

These clips deal with Youtube Terms of Use, but by analogy they can refer to other services like Dailymotion and Metacafe.