YouTube's new terms and conditions now sports a MySpace-like claim of "worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free, sublicenseable and transferable license to use, reproduce, distribute, prepare derivative works of, display, and perform the User Submissions."
As with MySpace, you still retain copyright—but YouTube also has rights to do just about anything they want with your material; and they can pass those rights on to anyone else they want. Not a big deal for 80% of the videos up there that have (at best) an extremely limited commercial value, or the other 19% that are actually owned by some other copyright holder (and, technically, shouldn't be on YouTube in the first place). Still, who's to say what's commercially valuable? (YouTube is currently being sued by the independent news reporter who owns copyright to footage from the LA riots.)
[via Boing Boing]
Posted by johndanseven at July 20, 2006 03:32 PM