In my last post, I commented on how some of the videos I’ve edited and produced have wound up on YouTube under other users names. This kind of riles me, for two reasons. First of all, and it’s not just me, I’ve noticed people reposting videos done by others and giving the impression that they did it themselves. I’m pretty sure that if the original producers and editors decided to put a copyright watermark on their video, they’d have a case for copyright infringement. But the other thing that riles me is that these videos were never meant to go on YouTube in the first place.
I produce videos for a large defense contractor (there are only two – you can guess which one) and until recently when we go our own YouTube channel, none of the videos I produced were intended for the Internet. However, it seems that a lot of the giveaway videos I produced got ripped from DVD and re-encoded for the Internet. Even though we didn’t (actually couldn’t) copyright our products, it’s still wrong to take what someone else has done and post it to the Internet without their permission, and give people the impression that it’s their own work.
It’s like stealing. And even if some don’t think it is, it’s still wrong to take someone else’s work and imply that it’s your own (are you listening, Joe Biden and Stephen Glass?). And even though it’s not technically work that’s owned by me, I put a lot of time in on these videos, and it galls me to think someone else can put them up on YouTube without even so much as an acknowledgement that someone else did it.
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