Are the YouTube IP Police going to come after my friend and me?
June 2, 2011 10:01 AM   Subscribe

Two part question regarding YouTube, account merging, and copyright infringement.

1.) My friend has not merged his YouTube account with his Google account and he is finally being forced. He favorites a lot of videos that are likely infringing and he is hesitant to link his Google account. Is he being a worrywart like I think or is there any validity to his concern?

2.) I have footage of Disneyland from the 50s and 60s that my parents shot on 8mm and has been converted to a digital format. Would it be okay for me to upload this stuff to YouTube for the Disney geeks out there or would it be some sort of an infringement?
posted by entropicamericana to Computers & Internet (5 answers total)
 
While I admittedly don't know anything about the account merging situation, is it possible for him to make a new google account and link his YouTube account to that, as opposed to his real google account?
posted by miguelcervantes at 10:34 AM on June 2, 2011


1.) I don't think there's anything to worry about there. Favoriting a thing is not in the same league as posting said thing, and in any case, all that's likely to happen is the thing gets taken down if an IP holder complains.
posted by juv3nal at 11:49 AM on June 2, 2011


You and your friend seem to be overthinking this. YouTube's policy with regard to copyright is basically to take down any videos that are found to be infringing someone's copyright (this can happen through a variety of ways, such as an automated filter matching it to a known copyrighted work, or people manually flagging it as infringement). In case 1, you are merely favoriting videos which may or may not be infringing, which will have zero consequences under any policy I know of. And if there is still a reason why your friend does not want to link the YouTube account to his Google account, he can easily create either a new YouTube account or a new Google account. In case 2, it's very unlikely that it would get marked as infringement, because it's original footage from your parents, but even if it was, in the worst case YouTube would simply remove the video from the site.
posted by burnmp3s at 12:20 PM on June 2, 2011


1) is fine, copyright strikes are given for uploading videos you don't own, not for viewing or favoriting them.

I have no idea about 2) because copyright law can be weird.
posted by wildcrdj at 12:56 PM on June 2, 2011


1) In no world would this be a problem.
2) Disney are lawyer-happy but the law is on your side on this one and, in any case, the worst that I could see happening is the video getting zapped.
posted by turkeyphant at 4:02 PM on June 2, 2011


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