New media entrepreneurs are supposedly stick-it-to-the-institution renegade types. But what happens when the tables get turned on the renegades and someone steals your IP?
Last week I realized that someone had taken one of our skits and uploaded the video onto their own YouTube account. When we launched the WatchMojo.com site back in January 2006, there was no way to download the video, heck, there was no way to grab the embed code, either.
We relaunched last year and you could now do both: you could grab an embed code and our files could be downloaded…
Ultimately, I agree with those who say media should be media-agnostic and really mobile, for consumers to take it where they choose to. We’re one of the disruptors: we create high-quality, low-cost content and syndicate it widely online. We have the luxury not to worry about cannibalism of offline sales.
The skit in question is an “Emo Thanksgiving”. For the record, I help develop a lot of the skits, but that one I had nothing to do with. I didn’t even know what emo was, in case you don’t either, according to Urban Dictionary:
Emo is a genre of softcore punk music that integrates unenthusiastic melodramatic 17 year olds who dont smile, high pitched overwrought lyrics and inaudible guitar rifts with tight wool sweaters, tighter jeans, itchy scarfs (even in the summer), ripped chucks with favorite bands signature, black square rimmed glasses, and ebony greasy unwashed hair that is required to cover at least 3/5 ths of the face at an angle.
Back to the story, someone named Squirrelonfire25 had effectively pirated our Emo skit.
Interestingly, Squirrelonfire25 has all of 1 clip on that YouTube account, and you guessed it, the one clip is ours… of course, as an individual user, he does not generate revenue, so while there is no tangible loss to us, we do not get credit for the streams either, so we lose, sort of.
Of course, I have long argued (or rather, stated the obvious) that YouTube is both commercial and promotional.
So when our clip is on Squirrelonfire25’s account, that video becomes promotional; when it’s on our profile, it is both commercial and promotional.
WatchMojo.com is an up-and-coming player in the video space, though. If the same thing was happening to NBC, CBS, ABC or FOX, I am not sure they would share my enlightened, glass-is-half-full perspective, especially when you consider that Squirrelonfire25’s 3,000 streams beat the streams we generated on YouTube 10 to 1.
Mind you, despite YouTube being so massive and accounting for 1 out of 3 streams online, the very same skit did 300,000 streams on MySpace (it’s nowhere close to being our all-time top performer, however).
Am I going to send a cease and desist letter to Squirrel Boy? No, not really.
Does it help or hurt us that he grabbed our clip and uploaded it onto YouTube? I think so.
But this begs the question: if you were, say for example, an investor in WatchMojo.com and you realized that 100 Squirrel Boys were downloading 1,000 videos and adding them on 10,000 sites, would you think this was a positive thing? I’d be very interested in your take on this. Email me at ash@mojosupreme.com or leave your comments below, please.
Without further ado:
To be fair to both of our valued partners, see Part 1 on MySpace:
And here’s part 2 on YouTube: A Very Emo Easter.
Hey, we might be a speck next to these two giants, but at least we’re loyal and diplomatic specks. And yeah, I don’t get the Emo humor either… but there are some funny parts in there.
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