Rick Rolled Out

[Remington]

It's back up, by the way.

http://mashable.com/2010/02/24/youtube-rickroll-removal-was-a-mistake/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oHg5SJYRHA0&feature=player_embedded

Keep on rollin.

[Placid Dingo]

I'm sure that Never Gonna Give you up did not represent a years work.

If so he only deserves the $16.

Granted the comparison may only stretch so far as 'we're both exploited'. Even so, the question of exploitation. When should this man have made money?

In 1987. When it was a hit. When it was a massive song. When it was selling CDs. Let's be realistic; the criticism of Youtube for exploitation is ridiculous because without YT, the Rickroll phenonomon would not have come about - the only reason this song is so well know at present is because for some reason it is part of this obscure cultural event.

Yes, he's a working stiff (EDIT: Just checked him out on Wiki; even if he only got 10% of the money his three person team made, that's still 6 million pounds - about 12 mil Aus and i think the same US), but he's being a whiny prat. Let's see if those foreign workers are making $16 a year from their hard work in 22 years, for the buildings they built 22 years ago.

[Rev. St. Syn, KSC (Ret.)]

This looks like a good place to quote our good friend Synaptaclypse Generator:

Public domain allows works to become integral parts of other works – Alice
in Wonderland is a good example. It has been borrowed from by thousands of
artists for thousands of reasons, and because of this, the story has lived
on and grown with us to the point of becoming archetypical. This is not
possible with works that are still under copyright for obvious reasons.

In the information age, our cultural heritage has gone global.
Scheherazade’s work is almost as much a part of our cultural heritage as
Shakespeare and Carroll. Innovations and enhancements on all of their works
enrich the scope and power of the original to inform our global culture and
provide a familiar framework for the innovator to work within.

For Eris’ sake, even weather data is under strict copyright – the National
Weather Service is limited on what weather data it is allowed to provide free
on its website, since the private sector owns pieces of the information.

I find it especially disappointing that the company that has benefited most
from information in the public domain is leading the fight to keep their
versions of those public domain works under strict copyright.

There is a common and oft repeated misconception that I wrote that. I stole it, actually and have always admitted this. I can't remember where from. It might have been the old 23ae. Sweet (K)!

[MMIX]

I'm sure that Never Gonna Give you up did not represent a years work.

If so he only deserves the $16.

That is actually a scarily close estimate. I did the math - calculating from StockAitkenWaterman's $105M profit over their 25yr history allowing for a 52 week year [but no weekends - they are creative ya'know] during which they worked 24/7 [still being creative all the time] they earned $2.67 a minute. So using those figures, yep must have taken him about 6 minutes to write it then. Yeah, I know its crap  - but I'm still flabbergasted that you used the word "deserves" in a discussion of financial remuneration . . . wtf does "deserving" have to do with pay???

Granted the comparison may only stretch so far as 'we're both exploited'. Even so, the question of exploitation. When should this man have made money?

In 1987. When it was a hit. When it was a massive song. When it was selling CDs. Let's be realistic; the criticism of Youtube for exploitation is ridiculous because without YT, the Rickroll phenonomon would not have come about - the only reason this song is so well know at present is because for some reason it is part of this obscure cultural event.

Yes, he's a working stiff (EDIT: Just checked him out on Wiki; even if he only got 10% of the money his three person team made, that's still 6 million pounds - about 12 mil Aus and i think the same US), but he's being a whiny prat. Let's see if those foreign workers are making $16 a year from their hard work in 22 years, for the buildings they built 22 years ago.

Nope, Waterman is not the working stiff I was talking about, in fact for the purposes of my argument he's a cypher for any other/unknown writer/artist. Imagine that Rickrolling is based on the creative output of  jobbing composer Snirk Dragney and sung by Earnest Youngman. They are 40 year showbiz veterans but never made it big. They just about paid their bills; they loved their careers but never got famous. In fact even when Earnest died after a long and financially debilitating illness his wife and two young daughters  were pretty lonely in the local chapel at his funeral. Snirk and a few of the old crowd came, of course, but it only made it to the bottom of the local news shorts column in the local paper. Mrs Youngman is deeply in debt and the $16 she gets from her husbands estate is not going to pay for sandwiches at the funeral tea; and Snirk? Well he spent the money on the bus ride to the funeral.

Pete Waterman may or may not be an overpaid jerk but that has no bearing whatsoever on the underlying principle at stake here. The nature of builders is to build, get paid, move on. The nature of creatives is to create and wait a lifetime hoping your creations will pay the bills. The nature of youtube is to be a COMMERCIAL enterprise trying to make MONEY from its content. I get what you and Cram are saying but you are glossing over the whole 'profiting from your work' issue. Waterman's work is writing songs for profit. And to quote Cram:

If you're not profiting off of your internet fame, it's because you're using a ten year old model.

I would suggest that, certainly in the short term, copyright law will not be able to maintain step with the phenomenal pace of change in the technology underpinning the culture business.

I'd also add that youtube as a BUSINESS was bought out for $1.6 BILLION, presumably by people using an extremely contemporary profit generating model who thought that they could make a monumental profit on the deal; though interestingly youtube = still not in profit - which begs several questions about how you can actually generate profit from this kind of enterprise, especially when people of the younger generation seem to have such a different take on "profit" and the nature of what constitutes a commercial transaction. You and Cram seem to be hung up on  'info wants to be free / music wants to be free' like it was still the 60's and you were damn hippies or something . . .  its really rather sweet


MMIX
         uses patchouli scented soap - not a dirty hippy dammit


pre-emptively edited to applaud the Synaptaclypse Generator piece

[Cramulus]

youtube's goal is not to make its content providers rich

youtube may be a business, but just because you're youtube famous doesn't mean that somebody owes you a check. Your fame has actually made a lot of money for youtube, but it's not like they're licensing your creativity, they're just capitalizing off the free trade of information.

What I'm saying about info wanting to be free is that the more youtube becomes commercialized,
(and I think we've all seen how it is changing after being bought by google)
the more power it gives to sites which aren't as controlling about what they present.

Youtube can do great as a commercial entity if it retains its stranglehold on kids linking each other to videos.
But the more commercials they add, the more copyright restrictions they adhere to, the less clicks they will get.

Look at napster - everybody used napster to pirate music. It reached a certain size, and then Napster decided to become a legitimate business venture and started charging and paying royalties. And overnight, it disappeared and was replaced by free trade venues like BitTorrent, Limewire, Gnutella, OpenNap, KaZaA, Morpheus, WinMX and FastTrack.

[Captain Utopia]

Youtube cannot make many content producers rich, spreading the wealth, while the prices it charges for advertising are kept artificially low.  Simply, the money isn't there - it's still being spent on billboards, radio, tv, newspaper, old established forms of media.  This is just one example I just found, showing that for every dollar spent, online advertising was at least 18x more effective than offline advertising.  But good luck charging higher advertising rates for your news site than The New York Times.  Not that there's a conspiracy, just sayin'.

But it's still early days.  Your friendly local cable company will dig its heels in for as long as possible at the prospect of delivering television channels through the high speed internet connection you already pay them for, even though they both currently use the exact same coaxial cable.  Because half its business model is dead when it loses its monopoly on over-priced advertising, which it will just as soon as it becomes the norm for people to have an internet device attached to their living room screen.  An internet device which can show premium content, funded (at least partially) by higher advertising rates.

The networks (Fox, ABC, etc) won't like this, because with a direct line to the actual talent, it will become possible to fund the production of high quality content without all the parasitic middlemen.  Advertising won't be a scatter-shot broadcast one-many approach, but demographically targeted.  Those companies which take advantage of this will reap the rewards, and the market will likely move dramatically when it does start to shift.

At that point the infrastructure behind Youtube and Googles advertising machine will be best positioned to  a) fund content and  b) deliver it.  I think this is why Youtube sold for 1.6 billion dollars, and if it plays out as above, it'll be a bargain in the long run.  At that point maybe even an asshole like Waterman would be able to buy more hookers and blow as a result of the rickroll meme.

We can but hope

[MMIX]

youtube's goal is not to make its content providers rich

No, its aim is to make its shareholders rich

youtube may be a business, but just because you're youtube famous doesn't mean that somebody owes you a check. Your fame has actually made a lot of money for youtube, but it's not like they're licensing your creativity, they're just capitalizing off the free trade of information.

There can be no free trade of copyrighted material - its kind of a contradiction in terms . . .

What I'm saying about info wanting to be free is that the more youtube becomes commercialized,
(and I think we've all seen how it is changing after being bought by google)
the more power it gives to sites which aren't as controlling about what they present.

Yes youtube is changing but No it is still hand over fist unprofitable. And, it is a reasonable bet that the sites which currently aren't as controlling will be knocked back into line like the ones you cited, Napster, KaZaa etc

Youtube can do great as a commercial entity if it retains its stranglehold on kids linking each other to videos.
But the more commercials they add, the more copyright restrictions they adhere to, the less clicks they will get.

They only need to retain enough clicks to turn a healthy profit and then the rest of us can go hang for all they care. And once the sector is sustainably in profit anything which can be ditched as not necessary to profitablity will be at risk. That's how business works. It ain't no damn charity to educate and entertain you . . . [British in-joke -that is the mission statement of the BBC]

Look at napster - everybody used napster to pirate music. It reached a certain size, and then Napster decided to become a legitimate business venture and started charging and paying royalties. And overnight, it disappeared and was replaced by free trade venues like BitTorrent, Limewire, Gnutella, OpenNap, KaZaA, Morpheus, WinMX and FastTrack.

Yes, lets look at Napster.
It reached a certain size, and then the PTB behind major copyright holders took them to court and drove them out of business and into bankruptcy and the NAME Napster was bought by another commercial enterprise at a bankruptcy sale . . . Thats why it pretty much disappeared. And a quick surf shows that Mininova went pretty much the same way; BitTorrent "is scaling back on some of its activities - specifically the Torrent Entertainment Network - to spend more time focusing on areas of strength ..." hmmmm, retrenching;  Kazaa "is now run under license as music subscription service by Brilliant Digital Entertainment, Inc."  - I don't know about you but I'm seeing a pattern here . . .

I am not disputing that things are changing fast and indeed probably actually need to change faster in the entertainment/culture business but as you can see from the $1.6Bill Google spent on youtube the roots of this change lie as much in board rooms as message boards and free-downloads are all part of the free-lunch mythology. Somebody, somewhere, is footing the bill for your "free" entertainment and they want a profit from it -  if they don't get it they may well pull the plug . . .

[MMIX]

Youtube cannot make many content producers rich, spreading the wealth, while the prices it charges for advertising are kept artificially low.  Simply, the money isn't there - it's still being spent on billboards, radio, tv, newspaper, old established forms of media.  This is just one example I just found, showing that for every dollar spent, online advertising was at least 18x more effective than offline advertising.  But good luck charging higher advertising rates for your news site than The New York Times.  Not that there's a conspiracy, just sayin'.

But it's still early days.  Your friendly local cable company will dig its heels in for as long as possible at the prospect of delivering television channels through the high speed internet connection you already pay them for, even though they both currently use the exact same coaxial cable.  Because half its business model is dead when it loses its monopoly on over-priced advertising, which it will just as soon as it becomes the norm for people to have an internet device attached to their living room screen.  An internet device which can show premium content, funded (at least partially) by higher advertising rates.

The networks (Fox, ABC, etc) won't like this, because with a direct line to the actual talent, it will become possible to fund the production of high quality content without all the parasitic middlemen.  Advertising won't be a scatter-shot broadcast one-many approach, but demographically targeted.  Those companies which take advantage of this will reap the rewards, and the market will likely move dramatically when it does start to shift.

At that point the infrastructure behind Youtube and Googles advertising machine will be best positioned to  a) fund content and  b) deliver it.  I think this is why Youtube sold for 1.6 billion dollars, and if it plays out as above, it'll be a bargain in the long run.  At that point maybe even an asshole like Waterman would be able to buy more hookers and blow as a result of the rickroll meme.

We can but hope

The ability to use things like PayPal and on-line subscription services to fund "product"- damn but that is an ugly word for cultural artefacts - is possibly the most hopeful direction that this thing can go. Paying 20p to d/l a single track could well be the way to actually generate the enormous profits that the edutainment industry demands in order to make us goodies.

[Rococo Modem Basilisk]

youtube may be a business, but just because you're youtube famous doesn't mean that somebody owes you a check. Your fame has actually made a lot of money for youtube, but it's not like they're licensing your creativity, they're just capitalizing off the free trade of information.

There can be no free trade of copyrighted material - its kind of a contradiction in terms . . .

If I may be a pedantic ass for a moment: by the terms of the Berne convention, all things that can be copyrighted are implicitly copyrighted. Futhermore, intellectual property is (at least in US law) is not part of criminal but civil law -- in other words, IP rights are functionally nonexistent until someone sues, at which point whether or not the rights have been violated is decided by the court (which is why fair use can be so cloudy an idea). When we are posting in this forum, this is a free trade of copyrighted material, since everything we have written is copyrightable and therefore implicitly copyrighted (except in the fringe case that someone here lives in a nation that has not signed the Berne convention and that therefore has no international copyright support) -- however, the various copyrights that exist and their respective various infringements do not in fact matter until someone decides to sue someone else. If you sued me for quoting you for quoting cram, then the copyrights would begin to matter (nevermind that it's a nonsensical suit and should get thrown out of court -- IP law is dictated by a lot of people, many of whom have only the vaguest idea about the context in which they are dictating legislation, which is why someone managed to successfully patent a linked list).

[MMIX]

youtube may be a business, but just because you're youtube famous doesn't mean that somebody owes you a check. Your fame has actually made a lot of money for youtube, but it's not like they're licensing your creativity, they're just capitalizing off the free trade of information.

There can be no free trade of copyrighted material - its kind of a contradiction in terms . . .

If I may be a pedantic ass for a moment: by the terms of the Berne convention, all things that can be copyrighted are implicitly copyrighted. Futhermore, intellectual property is (at least in US law) is not part of criminal but civil law -- in other words, IP rights are functionally nonexistent until someone sues, at which point whether or not the rights have been violated is decided by the court (which is why fair use can be so cloudy an idea). When we are posting in this forum, this is a free trade of copyrighted material, since everything we have written is copyrightable and therefore implicitly copyrighted (except in the fringe case that someone here lives in a nation that has not signed the Berne convention and that therefore has no international copyright support) -- however, the various copyrights that exist and their respective various infringements do not in fact matter until someone decides to sue someone else. If you sued me for quoting you for quoting cram, then the copyrights would begin to matter (nevermind that it's a nonsensical suit and should get thrown out of court -- IP law is dictated by a lot of people, many of whom have only the vaguest idea about the context in which they are dictating legislation, which is why someone managed to successfully patent a linked list).

@you . . . 

While you are technically correct I still stand by my point insofar as copyright material can always be controlled by the copyright holder.

[Triple Zero]

That's cute, but the law and reality seem to disagree.

[MMIX]

That's cute, but the law and reality seem to disagree.

Hence the legal distinction between de facto and de jure . . . but its like so much else - like for example if you stole my bike I would probably never notice and if I did I would probably not do anything about it - but if I stole yours then a crime would have been committed [and I'm assuming here that you would notice]

and also
What is this "reality" of which you speak .? .? .?                   

[Rococo Modem Basilisk]

My point is that everything's peachy until someone sues -- except in the cases wherein someone tries to cover their ass in case they might get sued. It's a bit of a pet peeve of mine when people throw around the term "copyrighted work" as though it's meaningful, because everything that can be copyrighted is automatically copyrighted anywhere where copyright exists, but that's just a slippery language thing (it's typically assumed that someone who doesn't make nonsensical statements about IP law otherwise means "registered copyright" by "copyright", but it's still potentially dangerous, since that usage encourages the people who equate licensce breach with theft, &c.).

[Cramulus]

youtube may be a business, but just because you're youtube famous doesn't mean that somebody owes you a check. Your fame has actually made a lot of money for youtube, but it's not like they're licensing your creativity, they're just capitalizing off the free trade of information.

There can be no free trade of copyrighted material - its kind of a contradiction in terms . . .

Really? I'm pretty sure I'm downloading Sean of the Dead right now. When it's done downloading, I will seed it. Sorry, copyright holders - your DVD price point is irrelevant to me.

there is really no way to stop two computer users from trading information with each other.

A lot of business models are going to have to adjust, because free communication is no longer something you can legislate away or prevent via lawsuit.

What I'm saying about info wanting to be free is that the more youtube becomes commercialized,
(and I think we've all seen how it is changing after being bought by google)
the more power it gives to sites which aren't as controlling about what they present.

Yes youtube is changing but No it is still hand over fist unprofitable. And, it is a reasonable bet that the sites which currently aren't as controlling will be knocked back into line like the ones you cited, Napster, KaZaa etc

...and in turn be replaced by more permissive organizations.

Look at napster - everybody used napster to pirate music. It reached a certain size, and then Napster decided to become a legitimate business venture and started charging and paying royalties. And overnight, it disappeared and was replaced by free trade venues like BitTorrent, Limewire, Gnutella, OpenNap, KaZaA, Morpheus, WinMX and FastTrack.

Yes, lets look at Napster.
It reached a certain size, and then the PTB behind major copyright holders took them to court and drove them out of business and into bankruptcy and the NAME Napster was bought by another commercial enterprise at a bankruptcy sale . . . Thats why it pretty much disappeared. And a quick surf shows that Mininova went pretty much the same way; BitTorrent "is scaling back on some of its activities - specifically the Torrent Entertainment Network - to spend more time focusing on areas of strength ..." hmmmm, retrenching;  Kazaa "is now run under license as music subscription service by Brilliant Digital Entertainment, Inc."  - I don't know about you but I'm seeing a pattern here . . .

Really? I'm seeing an inability to regulate the trade of information. As sites get larger, they become targets for legal attention, and then they must morph or die. Smaller, more private sites will continue to succeed. As mininova sinks, demonoid rises. When somebody decides to slap demonoid with a lawsuit and the thing goes belly up, all those users will flood to whatever site is next. You can't sue a mode of communication out of existence, even if it challenges your monopoly on a type of information. They tried to sue the Pirate Bay for damages to the film industry, how retarded is that? As if the Pirate Bay is the only website which hosts torrents.

And luckily for pirates, technological advancements will always be a step ahead of the law. And the law isn't globally uniform, so even if some American investors get all bitchtits, and American copyright law gets psycho groupie cocaine crazy, there are still tons of places where the net is unregulated. Online casinos are illegal in the USA, so they just keep the servers in Costa Rica. That's why the Pirate Bay is running out of a cyberbunker in Russia right now. And they developed their software so that they no longer need a central tracker site to manage torrents, the load is distributed throughout the network.

I am not disputing that things are changing fast and indeed probably actually need to change faster in the entertainment/culture business but as you can see from the $1.6Bill Google spent on youtube the roots of this change lie as much in board rooms as message boards and free-downloads are all part of the free-lunch mythology. Somebody, somewhere, is footing the bill for your "free" entertainment and they want a profit from it -  if they don't get it they may well pull the plug . . .

your mistake is in thinking that the Internet is owned by anybody. Yes, individual companies may sink of swim, but they are not the whole of the internet. It's not like the sharing of videos is going to cease being profitable and then disappear. If google dumps the company, all that traffic will just be absorbed by the hundreds of video hosting sites which want to be the next youtube. These companies can go ahead and pull the plug on "free entertainment" for all I care. This just hastens their realization of the inevitable truth - that they cannot possibly control how people trade shit. They should be working within the free trade model (and figuring out how to make a buck off of microtransactions and ad revenue) instead of fighting futilely against it.

[MMIX]

My point is that everything's peachy until someone sues -- except in the cases wherein someone tries to cover their ass in case they might get sued. It's a bit of a pet peeve of mine when people throw around the term "copyrighted work" as though it's meaningful, because everything that can be copyrighted is automatically copyrighted anywhere where copyright exists, but that's just a slippery language thing (it's typically assumed that someone who doesn't make nonsensical statements about IP law otherwise means "registered copyright" by "copyright", but it's still potentially dangerous, since that usage encourages the people who equate licensce breach with theft, &c.).

. . . and its a good point. Breach of copyright is of course a civil offence and it is only of relevance if an aggrieved party attempts to gain legal satisfaction. So my bike example was right in principle but wrong in law   To go back to the inimitable Mr Waterman . . . he is in an equivalent legal position to Rick Astley who is apparently NOT bothered by the whole business. Interestingly youtube have actually acknowledged that they owe Waterman for the use of the material by paying him the $16. Maybe they would just have done better to ignore the debt? It is possible that it is the derisory amount of $16 which is the irritant rather then the unauthorised use of the work - just a thought