Another point.... I say this knowing that I'll probably get flamed for it, but I think it's important to not to ignore points and try to silence them just because we don't like hearing them.... (After all, if this would go to court, anyone else with a bit of knowledge of Internet Technology and Law will probably tell you this....) Veoh could argue that part of what they are doing is acting like a web cache. And since Web Caching has held up in court, as being legal over and over again, that their caching of video is also legal. (Of course, this assumes that their software has been properly coded to act as a web cache.)
That's not what they're doing, though.
They take videos in common file formats and convert them to another file format (proprietary? Flash?), reposting an excerpt of the video in flash, even if the original was not in Flash.
The quality of the video changes as a result of this re-encoding. That makes this not the original work being cached, but the original work being changed in two ways:
* Encoded to a different file format, with possible size change and/or quality change
* Excerpted for viewing on Veoh before downloading Veoh's proprietary viewer and joining their community (the community which, presumably, has helped them get funding).
The excerpting might be considered "fair use," if not for the fact that it's being used as a tool to "sell" the complete, derived/changed work without permission (I'm not really sure if the fact that these sales are for the Internet currency of ad views matters in a court of law, but I'm guessing that it does). It's fair use to excerpt a work, and it's fair use to excerpt for purposes of sale, but only if you have permission to sell that work.
Changes like this are not "caching." They are "changing." Huge difference. Also, web caches keep the complete original web page and information: Veoh does not appear to be keeping important things like the creator's NAME and WEBSITE information on these works.
While I think it's important that we all get upset about this-- after all, if we're angry about this, then we should understand better why other creators and license holders get angry over unwarranted use of their works. However, please remember that, if you posted a clip from CBS on your site, you would expect to FIRST receive a "Cease and Desist" letter from CBS. Veoh seems willing to comply with such requests from us. Once you have sent them such a letter, for them to continue to display your site would be problematic.
The timing of Veoh's round of funding, coinciding with these 1600 or so feeds appearing in their directory, is disturbing, because it does imply some kind of monetary gain from the infringement, and it's not terribly believable (to me, anyway) that 1600 RSS feeds were manually entered by anyone, which gives the impression that Veoh has something more automated to do this. Auto-add, manual-remove?
But what's even more disturbing, which was touched on earlier but hasn't really been discussed, is that this is not the first time that Veoh has had to massively apologize for poor business practices here. In August, "someone" scraped all the email addresses from the Videoblogging list and used them to send out Veoh spam. Dmitry was shocked and uninformed that the database had been used this way. This makes me wonder if Dmitry is really this clueless about what his people are doing, or if he's maintaining "plausible deniability" when it comes to his marketing team. Whatever the case, there is definitely someone in his company that does not understand ethics. That person, no matter how effective they are, needs to be reigned in.
At that time, Veoh rectified the situation by wiping their database and starting over. Since they were able to do it then, I think that's why people are calling for them to do so now.
By the way, the mirroring of this Yahoo! group onto google groups has basically compromised every email address of everyone participating here, which is why I kind of wish the decision to mirror had actually been discussed prior to implementation. I originally subscribed here with an email address that i knew was spam-free. Since the mirroring began, I've started receiving hundreds of spams a day, and a google search shows that google groups is the only place where this email address appears unmangled on the Internet.
--Stephanie
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Stephanie Bryant
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