Vloggers Beware!
There's been a whole lot brewing in the videoblogging community these last few days over the unauthorized acquisition of videos by the online video service, Veoh. Apparently Veoh has been collecting videos from individual vlog sites as well as video services like blip.tv and OurMedia, and hosting them without the creator's knowledge or permission. They've also not given credit to the content creators for their work.
Videoblogging news site, We Are The Media (WATM), reported extensively about this issue in a post titled What's Going On With Veoh on April 8. The story was also covered on a number of blogs including GigaOM, and Loaded Pun, who has listed some of the pirated vlogs.
Comments
thanks for posting this Melanie. i was an early Veoh user, but once it was over-run by commercial music videos, movie trailers and such, i started having serious doubts about it.
when Veoh launched 2.0 (which completely screwed up my stuff shot in 16:9) in an attempt to position themselves as a youtube.com killer, i knew it wasn't where i wanted my work to be.
this news proves i was right.
Posted by: leslie | April 10, 2006 03:14 PM
I'm glad this info was helpful. I've never used Veoh, and don't know much about it, but for the sake of the vloggers/sites that were plagarized, and even for their current video providers, I hope they can straighten this mess out or they won't be around for long.
Posted by: Melanie | April 10, 2006 04:50 PM
What is also worrying is that, in its terms, Veoh states:
"You expressly acknowledge and agree that any User Material that you make available on the Veoh Service may be made freely available by Veoh through the Veoh Service, including without limitation for download by other users, and that this permission is made and granted in consideration of your use of the Veoh Service and is nonexclusive, perpetual, royalty-free, irrevocable and transferable."
These services all love the words "perpetual" and "irrevocable".
Once your blog has been 'scraped' and all your content is up on Veoh it is your word against theirs about whether you uploaded it or they made it available without your permission. I guess they could claim to have a "perpetual" and "irrevocable" right to use your content and you would have to prove you didn't upload it.
Posted by: Gary | April 10, 2006 10:26 PM
Don't jump to conclusions so quickly. Looks like veoh is one of the good guys.
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/videoblogging/message/38301
They took down the inapproriate videos. Looks like they may have gotten in there through a permiscuous upload system.
Posted by: Larry | April 10, 2006 10:32 PM
Draw your own conclusions from the massive amounts of information on this issue...but I don't know if I would say they are the good-guys.
Unauthorized feeds had been gathered for 6 months (example...mine).
Posted by: Devlon | April 10, 2006 10:36 PM