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The YouTube Conundrum
By Zach Arnold | March 26, 2006
By Zach Arnold
On our Fight Opinion forum, Al Yu points out a story about UFC contacting YouTube to remove a person’s multimedia video package featuring UFC fight footage. It’s pretty fair to say that YouTube has become an absolute nightmare for copyright lawyers and programming executives. On one hand, there is blatant copyright violation taking place. On the other hand, YouTube is exploding in popularity. In fact, so much so that the TNA pro-wrestling promotion used YouTube as a preview to put over an angle for their Saturday night Spike TV show. Nearly 20,000 hits!
YouTube has been at the center of controversy in recent weeks because of users uploading CBS Evening News clips of autistic basketball player Jason McElwain. It’s become a nightmare for promoters, businessmen, cable programmers, etc. who are watching An Army of Davids take over. Distribution is no longer something that can be controlled. It’s times like these that I rely so heavily on the opinions of media consultant Jeff Jarvis.
I can sympathize 100% with UFC’s position. On the other hand, I don’t know if you can stop this kind of activity. The digital genie is out of the bottle.
How would you handle this situation?
Topics: All Topics, Media, UFC, Zach Arnold | 2 Comments » | Permalink | Trackback |
Personally, I’d take a page from the WWE and offer per-fight or per-card ‘rentals’ online from $.99 to a few dollars for a full card (with discounts at the more cards/fights that are rented) to supplement protecting their interests (that way, you can exploit the internet market and not just try to surpress it and force everyone to rent/buy from a video store).
As an addendum, I’d assume UFC will go after Google Video, Yahoo Video, etc. next if they went after Youtube.
[…] While I was reading FightOpinion, I came across this post that about that says that YouTube contacted a member named “robbyp” telling him that his UFC videos are being removed. Here’s what he said on the Sherdog forums: So I got an email from the You Tube administration team letting me know that my “MMA Evolution” highlight had been permanently shut down and is no longer available at the website to view. Apparently(according to them), the UFC contacted You Tube and threatened to sue them unless they took down the highlight. This was followed up by an email from Melanie at [email protected] letting telling me that I’m not authorized to use or display any UFC-oriented footage on public access sites without the company’s consent. […]