NO TUBE LIKE A YOU TUBE

You borrowed money from your family and mates. You melted your plastic. You gave up this year’s holiday. You raided your brother’s wardrobe. You turned your flat into storage space. You became a taxi. Your mobile bill went north. You shared a bedroom with a bad tempered computer. Which is okay, because you gave up sleeping ages ago…

Congratulations. You made your short.

Now what? Burn DVDs for your pals? Fork out a fortune to withoutabox and submit it to the Berks County/Tucson Slow Food/Smogdance/
Sunscreen Film Festivals? Or maybe you could upload it to one of the hundreds of film sites now on offer? I mean, what could possibly be wrong with free hosting?

Well, it’s hardly a new story but it never hurts to remind the stupid. Boingboing and the Movie Blog recently put up alerts warning filmmakers to read the small print on YouTube. Which goes something like this –

…by submitting the User Submissions to YouTube, you hereby grant YouTube a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free, sublicenseable and transferable license to use, reproduce, distribute, prepare derivative works of, display, and perform the User Submissions in connection with the YouTube Website and YouTube's (and its successor's) business… in any media formats and through any media channels."

And it’s at this point your eyes glaze over.

As I’ve mentioned in previous blogs, it’s not just YouTube. Similar clauses turn up on other hosting sites. So what’s the problem? It’s not like they’re asking for an exclusive deal and anyway, they have to make their money somehow because a few clicks on a banner ad won’t keep them in business.

The great mystery here is how any of these sites make money. In the past I’ve criticised Propeller TV for demanding the right to re-edit your work, even add a new soundtrack or, if you’ve uploaded a music video say, vice versa, by taking the track and chucking away the pictures. Before you can say royalty payments, an ad for toilet rolls plays on real telly with your music on it. And you have no comeback. Whatsoever. At all.

There’s also the issue of library-building. By handing over rights, you’re giving these sites an asset, an asset that’s transferable when they get bought out by the big fry. Okay, maybe YouTube/Ifilm/
Propeller etc can claim to have 10,000 titles, of which 9,990 are on a par with clips out of You’ve Been Framed, only without the laughs. It doesn’t matter. What matters is they hold the rights to your film which, as long as you keep it on their site, means any money they make is theirs, not yours. Big business doesn’t give a toss whether your film’s any good or not – it’s all about being able to claim an audience, about having a few hundred thousand mugs listing their personal details so they can be targeted. About what looks good on the spreadsheet, not on the screen.

So why do people do it? Well, you could ask why two-bit film festivals set up ridiculous ‘film challenges’, you know, like ‘shoot and cut a movie in ten minutes with your pals’? It’s the modern day equivalent of downing a pint in a oner – it’s a distraction, a way of filling in a boring weekend, appealing to a weird kind of egoism that lets joe average think they can write/act/direct and who knows, even get paid. Or get famous…

It’s no different from my dad being in a band thinking him and his pals were the next U2 or (God forbid) Simple Minds. Never mind they were a bunch of no-hopers, but for about five minutes back in the 80s they believed they were on their way to a major deal and stardom. Back then buying a guitar was a lot cheaper and easier than trying to make a film. Now everybody owns a camcorder and a computer, we all want to be movie moguls, me included.

Sites inviting you to upload your movie only perpetuate the delusion that somebody out there will recognise your talent and pay you for it. It’s a modern myth. Most of us will end up doing whatever we need to do to stay alive. You only need to watch the X Factor auditions to know that only the few will be chosen. And just like YouTube and their pals, X Factor cashes in on the duffers – if you don’t believe me go buy their ‘Greatest Ever Auditions’ DVD. You think the talent-free punters get a cut? Tell it to Steve Whatshisname. Or Simon Cowell's accountant.

They don’t call it YouTube for nothing.