http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Aw8N2LQOqo
Last week in the enhanced UFR thread, everyone who I had been a dick to lined up to take a shot at me, which was fair, but I do want to clarify one point and give a brief (?) introduction to how YouTube works. First, I mentioned that I actually lose money on board embeds not to complain, but to argue that I wasn't being a hypocrite for calling out link spam since links benefit sites while posting embeds goes against my own interest. I think people couldn't see who who I was replying to and the thread became mostly about how I'm stealing other people's property in order to monetize Michigan football video on the internet for my personal gain. That's actually quite hilarious if you know anything about YouTube and copyright.
When you watch a video on YouTube, there are as many as 5 parties involved: 1) YouTube (Google Inc.), 2) Advertisers, 3) Content owners, 4) Media companies like Maker Studios, and 5) Users. Simply put, advertisers pay and Google, content owners and media companies profit. Users, including uploaders, are just tools.
Google does not want to remove copyrighted material from YouTube. All of the resources they provide for content owners are designed to monetize it. The content owners are not who you think they are. Some people took it as arrogance when I LOLed at the suggestion of reporting mgovideo to ABC/ESPN, BTN, Fox, NBC, the Big Ten, the university and the NCAA. I was LOLing because I know that none of these organizations directly monitor their content on YouTube. Reporting a YouTube video to the NCAA is tantamount to calling in a noise complaint to Interpol.
The content owners of college football game footage on YouTube are licensing agents. As soon as a video starts getting enough views to generate ad revenue in excess of about 50 cents, content owners swoop in to file copyright claims and grab the revenue. They are not required to provide any documentation. This creates an environment of false claims in which the SEC's content owner claims an episode of Inside Michigan football, the BTN deletes Brian's channel of mostly ABC/ESPN footage, ABC/ESPN monetizes BTN documentaries, a movie studio earns revenue from one of my videos that consists mostly of Denard and Kate Upton animated gifs and so on. Users can dispute copyright claims but all content owners have to do to reject a disputed claim is click a button. In my experience, they're pretty good at clicking buttons. On rare occasions, a video like Don Criqui BOOM Denard'd goes unnoticed by content owners (there's nothing in the title or description that they'd be searching for) and maybe I pay for my site's VPS, the electricity for my seedbox or a new hard drive to store games. If I'm a crook, I'm not a very good one.
