Adverts Mysteriously Appended to YouTube Clips

hey0you0guy writes "For the past few months copyrighted clips of shows have been edited to include advertisements for Gawker Media. These clips have been uploaded to the video sharing site YouTube by a user going by the handle Belowtheradar. These clips are then being linked to by Gawker itself: 'Gawker.com, for example, on Thursday featured a YouTube clip from ABC's talk show The View. At the beginning of the video, there is an ad for Gawker. On Wednesday, Valleywag posted a link to a video of television satirist Stephen Colbert talking about Wikipedia. At the beginning of that video there is an ad for Valleywag, a blog dedicated to Silicon Valley gossip.' CNet contacted the copyright holders for the videos (which range from NBC to Apple), and mostly received responses of 'we're looking into it.' At least two groups did confirm they did not give permission for this kind of advertisement."

Comments

Adverts Mysteriously Appear in Inbox

[Anonymous Coward]

n/m

Legal fees

[t00le]

We all know they have to come up with an interesting way to pay for all of the copyright lawsuits that are forthcoming.

it is mysterious

[stoolpigeon]

i wonder how they got there. i wonder if anyone will ever know. maybe leonard nimoy will do a show about it.

Will only get worse

[daeg]

The problem will only get worse as (a) YouTube starts paying users to upload content (b) users keep uploading unauthorized copies of shows and (c) YouTube starts needing to generate profits and adds more advertisements such as pre- and post-stream ads.

Why is this a problem? Now, instead of simply a DMCA takedown notice, YouTube is far more liable for damages because they made a direct profit off of the usage of unauthorized content. The users are more liable, too, since they will make a profit from YouTube.

Give them some credit

[TodMinuit]

They didn't cause a bomb scare.

Re:Give them some credit

[Headcase88]

Not true. I was watching one of those ads and right in the middle of it my computer exploded. Luckily no one was hurt but my Sony battery was reduced to ashes.

Opening ads

[hansamurai]

I really hope this is not going to be come common practice on Youtube. One of the reasons why Youtube is so great (and also probably why it is so successful) is because there are no pre-video ads. I hope that pre-video ads are only played if the user who is submitting the video chooses them to be played as part of some revenue sharing program that has been thrown around lately.

Re:Opening ads

[Achromatic1978]

And of course the hundreds of terabytes a month of bandwidth that such a site chews through, that gets paid for out of what, the goodness of the host's heart?

Re:Probably...

[Hijacked Public]

but wouldnt think they'd gunk up a free vid site

Why would you think gunking up a free video site would give an advertiser pause? The only thing stopping them from physically grabbing your eyeballs and pointing them at their ads is that that kind of thing is illegal in most places.

Oh noes

[Ravear]

I'm in ur tube... advertizing ur vid3oz

Like YouTube at the Micro Level

[N8F8]

Playing Devil's advocate I'd say this is a smaller scale version of what YouTube itself did. YouTube advertised itself with "borrowed" content to become famous and increase net value.

Re:Like YouTube at the Micro Level

[The Ultimate Fartkno]

Hey, you! You with the fancy logic and common sense! You get away from here with all that nonsense! This is Slashdot, fella, and we don't need someone coming around here and muddying up the message. YouTube runs on kitten farts and moonbeams, not MONEY! It represents the death of Big Entertainment and NOTHING ELSE! Power to the open-sourced people and death to the MPAA! Forget your shoveled-out Hollywood crap like Pan's Labyrinth and Children of Men, the future of entertainment is in the hands of the masses and we are the future! Ten thousand videos of tweenage girls singing "Fergalicious" into soup ladles can't be wrong!

FREEEEDOOOOMMMM!!

Re:Like YouTube at the Micro Level

[MeanderingMind]

I disagree. There is a fundamental difference here between what Youtube does and what the sleazy advertiser is doing.

Youtube accepts videos from people, and posts them to their website which features ads.

The sleazy advertiser is taking someone else's content, adding an advertisement into the content itself without permission, and reposting it.

While both involve advertisement, Youtube doesn't claim they'll post your video to an ad-free website, and they certainly don't steal your videos off your hard drive without asking. It's a WYSIWYG situation, anyone who uses Youtube knows the webpage has ads. The sleaze, on the other hand, is presenting these videos as something they're not.

Read the terms, please

[Gopal.V]

I assume a lot of people just click through the terms and conditions, but as a perpetual cynic (and coming from a family of legal folk), I generally have a quick read through. Here's an interesting excerpt from youtube terms

For clarity, you retain all of your ownership rights in your User Submissions. However, by submitting the User Submissions to YouTube, you hereby grant YouTube a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free, sublicenseable and transferable license to use, reproduce, distribute, prepare derivative works of, display, and perform the User Submissions in connection with the YouTube Website and YouTube's (and its successor's) business,

So, big surprise ! They've got a derievative work with an ad all over it. And I asked a lawyer. She said that that's pretty standard boilerplate, except hardly anyone modifies your content to include ads. The delivery of ads has been traditionally out of band of the content stream, but this makes sense.

Re:New spam?

[SQLGuru]

Certain spam *DOES* piggy back on legitimate e-mail.

Taken from some forwarded jokes.

Get Your Private, Free Email at http://www.hotmail.com/

Do You Yahoo!?
  Bid and sell for free at http://auctions.yahoo.com/

Layne

A couple of things...

[Evro]

1) Where's the "mysterious" part? Someone's putting ads into the clip before uploading them. Nothing "mysterious."

2) Appending means they're being tacked onto the end. If they're being added at the beginning, they're being prepended. Next time save the embarrassment and just say "added."

Re:A couple of things...

[Aladrin]

You need a better dictionary.

http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/prepend
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/append

Yes, prepend is 'slang' as are all new words before they get officially adopted.

Yes, append can mean 'attach' and not just to the end.

But don't forget you're on a nerd site and any programmer worth his salt will immediately think 'add to the end of' if you say 'append'.

You get a few points for the technicality, but you lose quite a few more for not speaking the local lingo.

Common practice, unlikely ...

[Ace905]

I think on the one hand, Gawker Media has gotten a *lot* of publicity from this - particularly after being discovered. Every news story on the incident has a link to their web page. But on the other hand, they now face a barrage of legal battles after admitting publicly that the uploader (belowtheradar) is '[their] video guy...'.

I doubt anybody will follow in their footsteps once the courts make an example of them, and that is very likely to happen.

In related news, The halfwit blowhard Amanda Congdon managed to get her little 'quote' of disdain in to the news article above ; so it's official, every worthless media-wh0&e not worth watching has gotten their 15 minutes of fame. Way to push the story.

---
speaking of 15 minutes of fame.

it's called the tragedy of the commons

[circletimessquare]

99 out of 100 people can be well behaved, but it takes only one asshat to stink up the whole place and make the experience miserable for everyone and ruin a forum's value or attract unwanted attention

newsgroups, email, many news aggregator sites (not slashdot, thankfully): all it takes is 1 or 2 committed asshats to ruin the fun for everyone else. usually advertising and spam. they see their own aggrandizement at the sake of everyone else's misery, and they choose to make everyone else miserable for the sake of something selfish and smammler in importance

it's predictable and inevitable that any utopian scheme that relies on everyone to behave nicely will fail. there's always one a**hole who will act like an a**hole. it's pretty much guaranteed. human nature is what it is. there's no vhanging or getting around it's good, it's bad, and it's ugly

Re:it's called the tragedy of the commons

[jfengel]

Slashdot isn't a commons, at least not in its news articles. They're picked by editors. Those editors fail in a lot of ways (dups, slashvertisements, crappy grammar), but as you observe they keep up a reasonably interesting stream of articles.

The comments are a commons, it's interesting that it's not too bad. One still sees occasional trolls, but several mechanisms weed them out: moderation, ignoring ACs, and Slashdot's filters. Eliminating graphical content helps, too.

I'm still surprised that you don't find groups of trolls banding together to subvert that. It wouldn't be hard for several to make a few intelligent comments, acquire karma, and then burn it all to moderate an ascii-art goatse image to +5. Presumably this doesn't happen because there are too many real moderators pushing such idiocies down; the wealth of mod points is on their side.

Wikipedia, too, is a commons where a combination of benign dictatorship (locking down controversial articles, banning troll users and unregistered users from some articles) and the general good-will to hide the trolls works to make the commons quite liveable.

That doesn't work for most physical commons. Modding down a troll is cheap; cleaning up a polluted river or the air is expensive, and not amenable to many people putting in a little work.

you forgot the rest...

[Mister Whirly]

"' CNet contacted the copyright holders for the videos (which range from NBC to Apple), and mostly received responses of 'we're looking into it.' At least two groups did confirm they did not give permission for this kind of advertisement."

The two groups went on to say "And we are kicking ourselves for not thinking of it first!"

Re:Shocking!

[TobyRush]

This is an outrage!

--
Hello, friend. Is your media bland and undesirable? Visit gawker.com today!

Re:New spam?

[Rob T Firefly]

But isn't this the first instance of someone advertising on ANOTHER person's content?

Nowhere near. Geocities and the like were doing it in the early days of the web.

"mysterious"?

[tverbeek]

What's mysterious about this? Did anyone actually expect people uploading other people's material to YouTube to be ethical?

Re:Probably...

[Rebelgecko]

Do you mean ilovebees?