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Google Will Save Videos After All
don9030582 writes "After Google announced it would permanently shutter its Google Videos collection, dozens of volunteers from around the world sprung into action in a massive effort to make a copy of the entire site. It was originally slated to go dark on April 29th, but now they have eliminated any such deadline and furthermore they will be migrating the collection to YouTube. We wish Google would have planned to do that from the beginning, but ultimately this is a victory for the preservation of user-generated content on the Internet."
Damn you Google: I spent last weeks sucking videos and wasting bandwith FOR WHAT? Time to send me that Nexus as a compensation, at least.
Nothing could have diminished faith in the cloud more than to delete years worth of content overnight from the cloud.
It was a dumb idea to even discuss deleting it forever when Google wants us to trust them to host the data forever.
The second URL explains it quite clearly:
We've created an "Upload Videos to YouTube" option on the Google Video status page [...] Before doing this you should read YouTube's Terms of Use and Copyright Policies.
So if it is against YouTube's policies, then it's out.
If you are curious, TED.com has a brief but interesting video that explains how YouTube automates their search for copyright infringement, and how effective it is regardless of the quality of the submission. These automated systems can tag shaky video recorded onto mobile phones, for instance.
To just erase years worth of content is just stupid.
Google does just that with YouTube. Much of the early-days classic videos were automatically purged - unless it was on some top-100 list or something then most videos from e.g 2005 or 2006 are just gone.
but hell, why should I be disallowed to?
Because you and millions of others like you continue to vote for legislatures that continue to allow this to happen.
No, it's like a water oasis in the dry west.
I agree they were never going to destroy the water. They just at first decided to remove all of the public access facilities.
No one's yet mentioned the other side of the story - to "start this campaign" all these volunteers - had to commit copyright infringement! So the wild part is that instead of suing each user for $ONE BILLION DOLLARS each, they said "oh, cool. You like that stuff. Okay, we'll keep it so we can make some ad money."
Remember that story about "what happens if Google buys Big Music"? *Relatively* Google is lax on copyright because they understand ad revenue relies on sharing velocity. So if they bought Big Music, and I wish they'd buy the airports and do a colossal Frontier Airlines makeover on them, in one administration all those security and **AA execs stuffed into the Gov driving the Winter of Fear are going to get mighty uncomfortable.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
How much community is there when "volunteers from around the world" adds up to "dozens".
Those were the people doing the downloading. There were thousands more who were telling Google not to be stupid.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
I too, give them more credit. This was a probably very effective campaign designed to fine-tune the advertising mechanism just a bit more, which, despite the inconvenience, serves ultimately to increase revenue. It's one thing to watch a video, but to put everything else aside to preserve it when the notice that it will disappear appears, sends a mighty strong ''Like'' signal.
Only free "clouds" have this limitation. Paid "cloud" can be governed by SLAs and contracts
Home and small business "SLAs" for paid hosted services are best effort only, and the "contract" for home and small business tiers stipulates only that the provider must refund the service for the rest of the period.
The problem with Vimeo is that it doesn't appear to want, say, videos about video games. If you developed the depicted game or obtained permission to post a video, it's "commercial use"; if not, it's copyright infringement. Start here; if you want more citations, I can provide them.
I spent 4 days downloading the letter "G" - over 29GB of data. Spent 4 days rsync-ing it back up to the archive server. It's nice to know that a bit of history has been saved. I can't judge its merits - to me it was a bunch of silly videos, but who am I to judge...