Moonage Webdream

I recently got banned from Youtube. It didn’t bother me too much as I know there are tons of other servers out there begging for hits. I just decided to fall back on one that doesn’t give me a lot of grief over simple things. However, some people don’t take too kind to Youtube’s heavy handed random enforcement of copyright “infringements”. The latest flap is over a video of a little baby dancing to Prince’s Let’s Go Crazy. That link is to Michelle Maulkin’s post, not Youtube. I’m kinda put out with them. She gets the hits, they don’t. Get it? Now, the silly part of this is the video clip is about 30 seconds long. The music is in the background. It’s incidental, and it’s low quality audio. It got yanked. If you prefer to hear a better version, just search for “Let’s Go Crazy” on Youtube and you can watch this:

The entire song. I see no copyright acknowledgment, nothing to say it belongs to Universal Music Group or Warner Brothers. It’s just there. Just as my stuff was, just as the dancing toddler was/is.

Or, if you prefer, you can watch one of the myriad rappers ripping off “Let’s Go Crazy” on Youtube. No acknowledgment of the original artist, no copyright acknowledgment, nothing. Or, you can watch other performers doing the same song in it’s entirety with no copyright acknowledgments at all as well. Out of all that, Youtube censures the dancing baby only. They’ve got problems at Youtube. One problem they won’t have to deal with is me posting obscure performances that people for the most part have forgotten completely about over time and if Youtube and the copyright holders had their way, would be forgotten forever. The one way to assure this doesn’t happen, for the time being, is to use providers that care more about the user than splitting legal hairs. When they start bucking up to the copyright owners and compel them to be more logical in how to deal with these sometimes incredibly obscure copyrights, THEN things will be a lot more pleasant and informative for the world. And if they don’t figure it out sooner, or even make an effort to try, the first victim in this fight will be Youtube. It would seem to me that the peeps at Google would have a clue just how fickle an internet user can be.