November 18th, 2006

A Lot of User-Generated Content Is Really User-Appropriated Content

by Scott Karp

The widely-used and much reviled term “user-generated content” implies that somebody is making something. But the dirty little secret of “user-generated” sites like YouTube and MySpace is that much of the content is not made by the users themselves — it’s appropriated from someone else.

So while everyone was watching Google engage in “frantic” negotiations with rights holders for all of that user “appropriation” on YouTube, MySpace was quietly pursuing its own rounds of negotiations — one of which has now blown up in Rupert Murdoch’s face. Universal Music has slapped MySpace with a lawsuit that may well determine the future of user-appropriated content. (Perhaps Sumner Redstone isn’t regretting the loss of MySpace quite so much today.)

Cynthia Brumfield says the lawsuit is a “good thing,” and I agree:

With two giants duking it out in the federal courts, the likelihood is good that some kind of legal precedent will be set. Maybe video file sharing sites (and other video-enabled Internet businesses) can finally get definitive legal ground rules, whatever they may be, providing a higher degree of certainty so that the industry can move forward.

In addition to dispelling the spectre of legal uncertainty, I hope we can also get past all of the disingenuous buzzwords and hype talk. At the end of the day, whenever anybody uploads or posts something to the web, it’s just a form of publishing. What’s radical about the new digital reality is that I can publish anything that I made — and I can publish anything that anybody else made.

Basic common sense tells you that if I were to take all of the content from another blog, publish it here, and then run ads against it, that would be wrong. Much of the tangled web we now face results from the euphemistic obfuscation of terms like “user-generated content.” If we call it what it is — for example, people streaming music from their MySpace pages while MySpace runs ads on those pages — then we can have a clear debate about the right and wrong of it.

Here’s another great example of how too much hype is making people talk nonsense:

Social media Web site Gather.com said Friday it completed a $10 million round of financing led by Pilot House Ventures that also included media giants Hearst Corp. and McGraw-Hill Cos.

Other investors include Jack Connors, chairman of advertising agency Hill Holliday and Gather.com CEO Tom Gerace and his family. The community Web site, which invites online chatter about politics, food and the arts, said it will use the funds to partner with leading media properties, as well as make plans for international expansion.

“Hearst recognizes the trend that audiences are increasingly consuming content created by people,” said Kenneth Bronfin, president of Hearst Interactive Media.

“Content created by people” — as opposed to content created by journalists and other non-people.

Please put the Kool-Aid down and back away slowly.

Topics: Hype | MySpace | User Generated Content | YouTube

  • well put, it is definitely wrong to copy and paste other peoples content, as well as mislead users as to what content is truly user generated or not.

  • I just find people so . . . unreliable.

  • Stephen, Happy Thanksgiving to you, too.


    When YouTube cleared the infringing content off its service, it only amounted to a small fraction of the overall total.

    Your source on that? Or do you practice "lazy, shoddy and misleading" commenting?

    It's a holiday, so I'm not going to spend all day piling up evidence for you, but here's a sample. I went to iTunes and found that Beyonce has the #1 song download. So I went to YouTube and searched for Beyonce. 6120 results. Here's one that was added back in January, with 679,790 views. You do the math.

    Now over to MySpace. Click Browse and choose the first profile at random. "Sweetness" by Jimmy Eats World. Is that "Miss Angelique's" band? I don't think so. Perhaps that's the reason for the big Universal Music lawsuit. I think it might be.

    I never said "all," I said "much" -- perhaps I could have made a better word choice, but I certainly never made the extreme statement you seem to be attributing to me. I never mentioned Blogger, Flickr, or Live Journal. If you "make up" what I said, sure it makes for a much better rant, but a publishable letter to the editor this ain't.

  • You say: "the dirty little secret of 'user-generated' sites like YouTube and MySpace is that much of the content is not made by the users themselves — it’s appropriated from someone else." You say that - but you don't present a scrap of evident to prove that it's true.

    When YouTube cleared the infringing content off its service, it only amounted to a small fraction of the overall total.

    When you look at blogs - whether on Blogger, LiveJournal or elsewhere - almost none of the posts is of copyrighted material. People are writing their own posts, not 'stealing' others'.

    Check out Flickr. How many 'stolen' photos are posted? Virtually none. People are posting their *own* photos.

    Move on over to MySpace. Actually look at the accounts. Is the site dripping with 'stolen' content? Well no. It's actually pretty hard to find. Most of what you find there was created by the user.

    This is really lazy, shoddy and misleading journalism. Why don't you write about things that are true, instead of things that you've made up and didn't even bother to verify?

  • Collage in visual art is already well established as part of fair use, as long as the elements used in the collage don't contain the "primary expression" of the original. So you can cut up 10 photos and rearrange the parts with no infringement, but you can't take one photo and paste a tiny piece of another photo on it and call it original.

    What we need is the same standard for multimedia. If you have a video and a mostly unintelligable chunk of something is playing in the background, that shouldn't be infringement. I think the guideline should be this: can you take that repurposed content and recreate the original content in a form that is equivalent to the original? In other words, if your grandmother is lip-synching to Celine Dion in the background of your YouTube clip, could someone take that clip and manipulate it to end up with an audio track of just Celine singing that they'd want to play instead of buying her CDs?

    That, to me, is where the line needs to clearly be drawn. If something is a remix that cannot replace the original, then no infringement takes place (defamation and trademark or tradedress violations might occur, but those are separate issues). But if you duplicate something in a form that someone could use instead of purchasing the original, then you are infringing.

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