The beginning of YouTube’s demise?

Posted by AJ Kirwin on January 27th, 2009 filed in Web 2.0, internet, technology

So, someone mentioned a song to me today, one I hadn’t heard before. Said it was good! So, I went off to try and find it, see if I liked it. My first port of call, as usual, was YouTube. Search.. there we go! Found! Click.. and nothing. I had alt-tabbed, so it took half a minute before I realised that I wasn’t hearing anything. So I went back.. okay, it’s playing. Still no sound, what gives?

I check a number of things, headphone connection, system sound level.. then notice something. Something I hadn’t seen before, below the video. This:

YouTube Copyright Notice

What the fuck? Since when does YouTube specifically disable audio. Who knows how many videos have been hit by this. I checked the YouTube blog and only found a single mention of this, back in december. Which I think will, understandably, irritate a lot of people. They tout a service called Audioswap as  a way to fix this, but lo and behold.. all the music on this truly fucking wonderful service of theirs is really, really obscure crap. I took a browse through the list. I don’t think I had heard of a single one.

YouTube themselves say that they are working things out that are win:win for content owners and users, but so far from what I have seen? Everything is just taking a huge crap from a great height onto users. They remove home videos if you happen to have a radio on in them, they’ll take down ANY video without a question if a major copyright owner asks for it, without even checking. And now this.

YouTube is already degenerating fast into five thousand videos a day of people farting, happy slapping and ‘partner videos’, the last of which is whatever the record labels deem to dribble out (Usually with all the fun things like embedding prevented).

Fuck sake, YouTube. You used to be so good :(


3 Responses to “The beginning of YouTube’s demise?”

  1. Екатерина Says:
    March 28th, 2009 at 1:20 AM

    Спасибо наконец то нашла то что хотела прочитать тут. Кстати у меня есть рисунки на эту тему. Куда можно скинуть? Ещё раз спасибо огромнейшее ! :)

  2. Flighter05 Says:
    April 3rd, 2009 at 5:23 PM

    that’s… so… MESSED UP… =/ what happened to equal rights… http://tinyurl.com/d4ew3f

  3. Renard Says:
    May 7th, 2009 at 2:19 AM

    I do agree that it’s kind of a pain that the whole audio muting thing has come into effect. On one hand, there’s the threat of legal action if the copyrighted content remains online, and on the other hand, there’s fair use.

    Here’s hoping that some day, copyright laws get a rewrite from the ground up. It’s the only way anything’s going to get fixed (er, so we can hope). Current copyright laws worked fine, oh, decades ago, when they actually did protect artists’ work. Now it’s just hurting the media industry in every way possible, especially consumers and the indie film / music scene.

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