Morality of watching copyrighted YouTube videos

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Some content owners allow their content which has been illegally uploaded to YouTube to remain because they can either prevent the uploader from earning money through the video, or they can even make revenue off the video.

In such a case where the owner allows the video to remain despite it being illegally uploaded, is it permissible to watch it?
 
We’ve been over this before.

If your conscience, personally, is bothered by watching Youtube videos because you think they might violate someone’s copyright, then don’t watch them.

The reality is that in 99 percent of cases, you don’t have enough knowledge of the law to know for sure whether it’s “illegal” for some video to be up there or not. If a video is up there illegally or in violation of the purported content owner’s rights (which technically is not the same thing as being “illegal” in all cases), the content owner can have it taken down.

In many cases, the content owner either chooses not to have it taken down (often because as you said, they are making money off it somehow, getting a ton of free publicity, etc.), or there is something about the way it is presented that might make it a legally permitted use.

I would be more concerned with the morality of the actual content, given that there is a lot of trash on Youtube. You can rely on the takedown procedure mechanism already in place for the rights owner to remove content they own and have a legal right, as well as a desire, to remove. It’s not really something you or I need to worry about.
 
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Tis_Bearself said:
In many cases, the content owner either chooses not to have it taken down (often because as you said, they are making money off it somehow, getting a ton of free publicity, etc.), or there is something about the way it is presented that might make it a legally permitted use.
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I’d like to add a third scenario here. In some cases, the copyright owner has the desire to remove it, but not the time or manpower to do so.

I used to do the copyright removals for a small Christian music label and this was one of my tasks. Because of the overwhelming amount of illegitimate uploads and the fact that I was just one person, we had to prioritize and only focus on the current album releases. Note: it’s quite possible that, since I did this years ago, YouTube has since come up with a way to present the relevant uploads to the copyright owners. I used to have to run lots of searches and try to find them all and it was time-consuming.

That said, I essentially agree with you, Tis: one mostly just needs to trust that YouTube and copyright owners have found a way to work it out, because the viewers are not in the best position to be able to determine copyright in most cases. So, my answer to the OP would be that, yes, generally it is permissible to watch it.

However, I personally still spend a reasonable amount of time making reasonable efforts to help original content creators. For example, if I go to YouTube and search for a song, often one of the entries will be the upload from the band or its label. I’ll spend a little time to wade through the results and try and find the “official” upload so any advertising credit works its way back to the band.
 
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Wampa said:
Note: it’s quite possible that, since I did this years ago
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Regarding music, spectral analyses is automatically performed on the content and if it’s in violation (even just a few seconds excerpt) the upload is blocked. This family of software is denominated “music recognition” the best known of which would be “shazam”. A company like youtube doesn’t block automatically only what they don’t want to.
 
A lot of my friends are small independent artists, and they make next to no money selling music, even legitimately. They make more money from people coming to shows or buying merchandise like t-shirts. Therefore, having a track on Youtube, which is usually something like a live performance or a clever fan video, is actually helpful to them in terms of getting them exposure.

That’s not to say that some artist here or there doesn’t still complain about rights infringement, but most of them don’t when it’s a case of fans sharing for fans. Now if another artist took credit for writing all their songs, that’s something else again.
 
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The answer is pretty simple: if the content was not uploaded by the performer, a recognized company, or agent, and was put there by jj_wr8n8n9, then it’s a safe bet it was put up there illegally. Copyright is not just the right to copy but includes the right to distribute as well. Under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, youtube is protected by what is called Safe Harbor. So, if my company owns the rights to a movie, TV show, song and other works, I can contact youtube with a take down notice. Of course, I have to show that I own the work in question. If it’s just some guy showing off his model train collection, that’s another thing.

Sometimes, a listing for something on youtube will include a link to another site to see or hear the whole thing. That’s wrong as well.

youtube does have a place to educate people about copyright.

 
Watching?

You paid for the internet (and therefore YouTube) so … what have you done wrong?

Sharing it for pay? That’d be more like an abuse of copywriter laws, IMO.

As to what YouTube owes to copywriter holders for making their stuff available … ?

Meh. A low priority for me. 🙂
 
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