A Modest Proposal to YouTube
I record cover versions of songs I love and put them up on the internet. As a rabid supporter of the rights of content creators, a few years ago I did a little research, found a copyright service called Limelight, and sent them $141.60 for the first three gems I recorded and uploaded. (I sincerely hope some of that money found its way to the actual artists, but that’s a whole ‘nuther blog post.) Those licenses entitled me to 200 downloads and 100 streams for each song. How did I come up with those numbers? I guessed.
Limelight closed down in 2015. I assume the Harry Fox Agency has taken over collecting money from the other chumps like me who try to follow the rules.
Limelight closed down in 2015. I assume the Harry Fox Agency has taken over collecting money from the other chumps like me who try to follow the rules.
Ah, the rules. The rules are vague, because the internet. To take the prime example, the people who put stuff up on YouTube, self included, use what Andy Baio in Wired calls the “begging for forgiveness” model: you upload the tune and wait to see what happens. If a legitimate copyright holder objects to your three-trombones-and-an-accordion remake of The Lion Sleeps Tonight they tell YouTube and YouTube takes it down. This is known as a “copyright strike” and if you accumulate three of them YouTube shuts down your channel. But how did the copyright holder find out about your astonishingly cool version of Lion (that has already earned a whopping 54 views) anyways?
Let’s back up a second and look at how big this actually is. Baio, writing in 2012, said that 12,000 new covers were uploaded every 24 hours to YouTube. (I have seen more recent sources that cite 10,000 uploads in 24 hours.) As far as I have been able to gather YouTube is silent on the topic, but doing the math conservatively gives us something like 3.5 million uploads a year.
YouTube is not stupid. They realized two important things early on: 1) people were infringing copyright from the very first day, and 2) advertising was eventually going to become very important. The problem was reconciling the two, so in 2007 YouTube introduced a service called Content ID. Content ID is a sophisticated algorithm that inspects everything that gets uploaded to YouTube and compares it with content it knows to be protected. If such material is found, Content ID alerts the copyright holder who then decides whether to demand the content be removed or left alone. Why don’t copyright holders automatically demand removal, you ask? Advertising revenue. If the copyright holder chooses to leave the content up, they are entitled to a healthy percentage of any ad revenue the content earns.
YouTube says that as of July 2016 they have paid out $2 billion dollars to “rightsholders who have chosen to monetize claims”. No matter how you slice it, that's a lot of ad revenue. YouTube has over 8,000 partners that use Content ID, among them “major network broadcasters, movie studios and record labels” which is incidentally also where all the data that tells Content ID what the original actually looks and sounds like comes from.
In light of this, the “begging for forgiveness” model is somewhat odd. No one has any idea what is legal and permissible, what will be flagged and removed, whose channel might or might not get shut down, and copyright owners aren't being compensated for use of protected content from the huge pool of people who record cover versions. The irony is that users who put up their own versions of protected content are actually drawing attention to the original and enhancing its value, and most of them do it out of a sincere regard for either the song or the artist. There’s no intent to rob anyone, it’s just fun.
So if I’m one of the smart guys at YouTube I’m thinking like this: there are 3.5 million cover songs uploaded every year. True, we already monetize a small amount of these that are popular enough to generate advertising revenue, but that leaves out all the channels that don't have any advertising at all. Why not set up an agreement with all our users and partners where we automatically charge a $15 fee for every cover song upload and grant the user/uploader a conditional blanket mechanical and sync license? We can potentially generate $55 million a year for copyright holders minus a percentage we keep as an administration fee. For the Lion cover the three trombone guys and the accordion player split the $15 fee, the heirs of Solomon Linda get a small check, we get a cut, and everybody walks away happy. If after the fact the copyright holder does not approve of the content, or decides it wants more money from the user, we rescind the license, take the content down, refund the $15 minus the admin fee to the user and walk away. No need for phony estimates of how many streams or downloads should be paid for, and no need for copyright strikes, since the user demonstrated intent to comply by paying the fee up front.
Let’s back up a second and look at how big this actually is. Baio, writing in 2012, said that 12,000 new covers were uploaded every 24 hours to YouTube. (I have seen more recent sources that cite 10,000 uploads in 24 hours.) As far as I have been able to gather YouTube is silent on the topic, but doing the math conservatively gives us something like 3.5 million uploads a year.
YouTube is not stupid. They realized two important things early on: 1) people were infringing copyright from the very first day, and 2) advertising was eventually going to become very important. The problem was reconciling the two, so in 2007 YouTube introduced a service called Content ID. Content ID is a sophisticated algorithm that inspects everything that gets uploaded to YouTube and compares it with content it knows to be protected. If such material is found, Content ID alerts the copyright holder who then decides whether to demand the content be removed or left alone. Why don’t copyright holders automatically demand removal, you ask? Advertising revenue. If the copyright holder chooses to leave the content up, they are entitled to a healthy percentage of any ad revenue the content earns.
YouTube says that as of July 2016 they have paid out $2 billion dollars to “rightsholders who have chosen to monetize claims”. No matter how you slice it, that's a lot of ad revenue. YouTube has over 8,000 partners that use Content ID, among them “major network broadcasters, movie studios and record labels” which is incidentally also where all the data that tells Content ID what the original actually looks and sounds like comes from.
In light of this, the “begging for forgiveness” model is somewhat odd. No one has any idea what is legal and permissible, what will be flagged and removed, whose channel might or might not get shut down, and copyright owners aren't being compensated for use of protected content from the huge pool of people who record cover versions. The irony is that users who put up their own versions of protected content are actually drawing attention to the original and enhancing its value, and most of them do it out of a sincere regard for either the song or the artist. There’s no intent to rob anyone, it’s just fun.
So if I’m one of the smart guys at YouTube I’m thinking like this: there are 3.5 million cover songs uploaded every year. True, we already monetize a small amount of these that are popular enough to generate advertising revenue, but that leaves out all the channels that don't have any advertising at all. Why not set up an agreement with all our users and partners where we automatically charge a $15 fee for every cover song upload and grant the user/uploader a conditional blanket mechanical and sync license? We can potentially generate $55 million a year for copyright holders minus a percentage we keep as an administration fee. For the Lion cover the three trombone guys and the accordion player split the $15 fee, the heirs of Solomon Linda get a small check, we get a cut, and everybody walks away happy. If after the fact the copyright holder does not approve of the content, or decides it wants more money from the user, we rescind the license, take the content down, refund the $15 minus the admin fee to the user and walk away. No need for phony estimates of how many streams or downloads should be paid for, and no need for copyright strikes, since the user demonstrated intent to comply by paying the fee up front.
Creative content has value. If you create a new work using someone else's content and distribute it to the world, you should pay them a fee, even if you’re doing it just for fun. On the flip side, creativity should be encouraged, and no one should be punished for uploading their own version of a song. Simple as that.
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