Copy left becomes copyright

If you don’t know, the terms of copyright for posts in YouTube are - what's yours is yours, but YouTube has a carte blanche over your clips. And that's the devil's bargain with all social and sharing sites - they're great fun, but you always need to remember that you are the raw material of their business.

Not getting the hang of it? Loosen up. Here’s something (not so) hilarious.

This chap Christopher Knight from NC posted a video in YouTube so that he could point to it from his blog. Few days later, a friend tells him that his video was included in a show called "Web Junk 2.0" on Viacom's VH1 channel. The show compiles wacky clips from the Web and host Aries Spears adds some suitably comedic commentary. "Well, that's pretty cool", thought Knight, who proudly posted the video of that segment on YouTube for the benefit of his blog audience.

That’s when shit hit the ceiling. YouTube tells him that his clip is being pulled down following a copyright complaint from Viacom….!

The bottom line, as Knight writes: "So Viacom took a video that I had made for non-profit purposes and without trying to acquire my permission, used it in a for-profit broadcast. And then when I made a YouTube clip of what they did with my material, they charged me with copyright infringement and had YouTube pull the clip. Folks, this is, as we say down here in the south, 'bass-ackwards."

Indeed.

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