Unless you have been living under the proverbial rock, you know that video downloading is king in the world of growing technology. YouTube, before Google swallowed it up in one huge multimillion dollar gulp, was the place where you could share videos of your family vacation, your geeky proposal to your high school sweetheart and your baby's first steps to not only relatives living far away but the entire planet. It was an amateur video smorgasbord of stuff - often hilariously bad - that was, in my opinion, very no harm no foul and it was logged on to by millions on the hour on the hour every day of the year. Then the tech geeks got involved and figured out they could share their library of clips of archive television programming with someone other than their other geek friends. You could watch a clip of that famous touchdown by that famous football player at that famous super bowl. You could watch rare footage of Kate Bush singing on live television and you could watch that seminal moment when Diane and Sam or Addie and David or Mulder and Scully got together. All free anytime you would like.

The problem is that those geeks - bless their little cotton socks -DO NOT OWN that material. It belongs to the copyright owner - in most cases, the network where the show first aired. For a good long while, because it seemed all of the stuff was often decades old and was in clip form as opposed to the entire program, the networks seemed to ignore the infringement - possibly hoping that people would get bored of community building and sharing videos with millions of others! With the sale of YouTube to Google - a major player in the media world who needs the cooperation of those content owners to survive - comes a whole set of issues over copyrighht infringement. It's cool for a studio to release footage of BORAT before the film hits theaters because they own it. It is not okay for someone who works at Fox to smuggle out a copy of the film and upload it to YouTube so that everyone and their mother can watch it for free.

I am not one to always agree with "the man" as a dear friend would call the networks and studios BUT there is something to be said for standing up for what is yours and that is exactly what they are doing. I think, unlike most things that come out of the studios, this will be an excellent thing for indie filmmakers. Cracking down on YouTube for copyright infringement would make sure that films were not on the site illegally - uploaded by someone who does have ownership. Too often indie filmmakers get screwed out of profits from exhibition and move to make sure that everything that is uploaded on the free site is uploaded by the owner can only be good. In my mind, it indicates respect for the creator of that work no matter how good or bad it is and it makes the end user more aware of the actual work it takes to make the video they are enjoying instead of working.

More and more, short film distributors tell me that they have had to call YouTube out for having films on the site that they in fact have ownership or licensing rights to. Over the past few weeks, as more and more of the major players get a little mad, they are having to call them out less and less. The trickle down theory working at its very best,

Keeping it indie,

Julie