YouTube Owns You! (Or at Least it Owns Your Posted Videos)

Two years ago, no one had ever heard the word "YouTube". Now, it's everywhere all the time. If you missed an episode of a TV show, it's there. In the mood for an obscure documentary on Transylvania? It's probably there somewhere. But what most people may not know is that under YouTube's Terms of Use policy, it owns anything you post on the site.

While you retain the original copyright to the material, you are also required to grant YouTube a "worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free, sublicense and transferable license to use, reproduce and distribute" your work. YouTube can also create derivative works of the submission.

I have not heard of YouTube doing anything with any of these licenses users have granted to them. And they may never do anything, but now that Google owns YouTube, that possibility certainly exists.

Here is the dicey bit from YouTube's Terms of Use page:

C. For clarity, you retain all of your ownership rights in your User Submissions. However, by submitting 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 successors' and affiliates') business, including without limitation for promoting and redistributing part or all of the YouTube Website (and derivative works thereof) in any media formats and through any media channels. You also hereby grant each user of the YouTube Website a non-exclusive license to access your User Submissions through the Website, and to use, reproduce, distribute, display and perform such User Submissions as permitted through the functionality of the Website and under these Terms of Service. The above licenses granted by you in User Videos terminate within a commercially reasonable time after you remove or delete your User Videos from the YouTube Service. You understand and agree, however, that YouTube may retain, but not display, distribute, or perform, server copies of User Submissions that have been removed or deleted. The above licenses granted by you in User Comments are perpetual and irrevocable.

View it here: http://www.youtube.com/t/terms

This information probably does not apply to 99% of us, but if you are putting a lot of time and money into marketing videos, training, feature movies, shorts or other original content, you may be giving away a lot if you're using YouTube's site to post it. As a matter of fact, all the free video posting sites I looked at require that as a condition of use you transfer to the site the right to use, modify, distribute, etc., your video content, including myspace.com, iFilm, and Yahoo Video, to name a few of the bigger ones. Again, I am not aware of any actual or proposed use of these license rights by the free video posting sites, but that doesn't mean they won't chose to avail themselves of the option in future. We lawyers tend to speak in terms of contingencies and worst case scenarios.

Most things that are free aren't. Be careful with your intellectual property. If you want to retain the rights to your original content, you may be better off going with one of the pay sites that are more limited in their licensing. But that's another post.