Apparently, we weren’t the only ones to blog about the online video copyright issue last week. Heather Green at Business Week’s Blogspotting wrote about Ze and Amanda’s videos too. Check out the comments.

Heather’s recent article for Business Week’s Technology section digs even deeper: Whose Video is it Anyway? She points out that many new online stars are now looking for more control over their content. She also notes the tricky copyright issues surrounding ad-based revenue models for video-sharing sites like YouTube.

ZDNet picked up the story as well, citing EepyBird and Ze Frank as examples of creators standing up to defend their copyrights.

Brian Oberkirch chimed in. Super smart, as usual.

43 people are digging our post from Friday.

The conversation is far from over. The complexities involved in protecting your intellectual property in this new media frontier have only just begun to make themselves plain. This video-sharing business really is like the Wild West. Just two days after posting the article above, Donna Bogatin from ZDnet posted this article in which she suggests that Revver’s Terms of Service might be less content-creator-friendly than those of YouTube.

Bogatin asserts that our terms require content owners to license their content to Revver on a perpetual, royalty-free basis, not subject to revocation. In reality, this has never been our understanding of the license and Revver remains committed to the precept that creators must retain the ultimate legal power to control their works, and are entitled to reap the rewards of their creativity. However, we realize there is some confusing language in our terms so please allow us to clarify. In order to give our creators the greatest amount of control while still granting us the rights we need to share and monetize their videos on the network, we adopted the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Derivatives license. This license includes some language that suggests the rights you grant us are perpetual and irrevocable.

Rather than debate a legal analysis of our contracts, we have - effective immediately - revised our terms to eliminate any ambiguity.
The new version therefore clarifies and confirms (1) that neither Revver nor our syndicators are obtaining permanent, irrevocable rights to our
content holders’ works; and (2) that, of course, “royalty-free” does not mean and never has meant “revenue-free.” The essence of the Revver
philosophy (in contrast to that of YouTube) is that the creators should share in the revenues generated by their works. Revver is committed to
offering an optimal license agreement whereby Revver gets those rights it needs to maximize distribution of our creators’ works, and the
revenues we share with content-holders, while our creators retain final control.

Basically, it all boils down to this:

If you put your content on the internet, it’s out there. It’s going to be downloaded, emailed and shared across the web. This is the nature of the internet. There is no such thing as a closed network. The harder you make it to steal something, the more people will find a way to do it. This open media arms race is the fundamental problem with DRM.

Revver supports the free and open sharing of content on the web. But we also believe that the creators should have some way to benefit from that.

So we’ve created the first ad-supported network built upon the idea of the open web. We believe ours is the true new media model. Independent content-creators are at the center of our business model and the heart of our philosophy as a company.

Thanks for being a part of the revolution with us.