The Register reports on how YouTube owns any content you submit and they can use your content as they wish without royalty. FromThe Register:
In its Terms & Conditions, the wildly popular video sharing site YouTube emphasizes that "you retain all of your ownership rights in your User Submissions".
There’s quite a large "BUT…", however. Not only does YouTube retain the right to create derivative works, but so do the users, and so too, does YouTube’s successor company. Since YouTube has all the hallmarks of a very shortlived business – it’s burned through $11.5m of venture investment (Sequoia Capital is the fall guy here) and has no revenue channels – this is more pertinent than may appear.
The license that you grant YouTube is worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free, sublicenseable and transferable.
The article suggests that if YouTube ever go bankrupt, they’d be sitting on all the content which users have submitted.
There was a similar row over MySpace a few weeks ago. Many artists used to use MySpace to promote their music and their band. However, anything you upload belongs to Robert Murdoch and BSkyB.
Web 2.0 isn’t just about sharing your content – it’s about sharing your rights and ownership of the content with these companies. A lot of people may argue that terms and clauses such as this are there to protect the site owners which is fair enough but they provide no protection for the site users.
Certainly something to think about before using these sites.
Maybe a term they could use is instead of saying that the website has worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free, sublicenseable and transferable licensing over the content you upload would be they have those but only within the context of the service you are using.
As in they have the protection to have the music playing on the website but as soon they play it on the radio that it’s no longer legal as it is not within the context and confines of the website and its TOS.
Would be alot better for everone involved, except maybe the owners who secretly want all this free music to use as and when they please.