Shelving the book
As an update to my previous post, the extremely funny and popular “Introducing the Book” skit from the Norwegian broadcaster NRK has been pulled from YouTube.
It seems NRK is one of those broadcasters that isn’t comfortable with sharing their stuff outside of their own confines (*coughs nervously and looks around him*).
“Introducing the Book” was “removed by user” from YouTube last night - despite NRK’s own glowing news report (from two days ago) on how “Norwegian humour is catching on internationally”. (One wonders how long this clip will be YouTube…)
That clip describes how the clip has topped the YouTube charts - a relative rarity for a clip from Norway - and had received over one million viewers via YouTube. But the writing was on the wall: the announcer also mentioned that
It is illegal to upload NRK material to the Internet without an agreement, and NRK’s lawyers are now investigating the case.
She goes on to say that Oystein Bache, who cowrote the skit six years ago, was “flattered” by the bit’s popularity:
this is probably the closest we are getting a world wide launch, and we are very pleased so far.
A sad response to international acclaim, huh?
For the moment, the original Norwegian version is still on YouTube, but don’t bet on it staying there.
To NRK’s credit, the clip is available on their own site - in Norwegian only. (The accompanying story headline still refers to their former viral success: NRK-klipp på YouTube-toppen.)
Which is great, and all… if you understand the Norwegian language. Which only 0.07 per cent of the world does.
Now, lest I sound too sanctimonious about NRK’s decision to murder their own success, I should disclose that CBC has done the very same thing.
One of the most popular clips on the CBC Archives site (where I work) is a 1993 clip entitled A Network called ‘Internet‘. The National host Peter Mansbridge introduces the internet for the first time, and you can hear the air quotes around the term (throughout, it’s just called “internet” - the word “the” became popular later, I guess.) Great clip, gets a lot of traffic.
Also got a lot of traffic on YouTube, where someone posted a pirated version. There was no credit given, no mention of CBC, no link to the source, and worst of all, someone inserted a pre-roll ad for another website at the beginning. CBC requested the video be removed, and it was. (Of course, it reappeared a few months later - but the YouTube version is really horrible quality.)
Are these cases any different? I’m not sure. In CBC’s defence, the YouTube version is identical to the CBC one, but lower quality. The NRK clip is different in that it offers no English translation; the YouTube version added value (one could almost argue it’s a derivative work, if one had a ballsy lawyer.) I don’t decide these things, but in the CBC case I think the lack of credit and the inserted ad made the piracy a lot harder to put up with.
The NRK clip in all likelihood had rights issues not present in the CBC clip - the skit had writers and actors, and I know that in Canada these are major stumbling blocks to putting anything on the internet (see the current ACTRA dispute over just this issue.) Perhaps they had no choice but to take it down from YouTube (but not their own site) or face the wrath of the unions. Who knows.
And, copyright aside, any time a clip appears elsewhere it means less traffic to the owner’s website, and less ad revenue (but more bandwidth cost….)
Regardless, fencing your content in isn’t the best way to get viewers. CBC is exploring outside partnerships already - we already have a deal with Google Video, which now owns YouTube. If you go to video.google.ca, you’ll see a whole section of CBC clips.
To my knowledge, there isn’t a similar section for NRK (though Google Video has over 500 NRK clips, probably illegally.)
Perhaps they are working on a similar deal. I’d check their website to find out… but I don’t speak Norwegian.
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Update (22 Feb. 07): For the moment, the video has been reposted here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xFAWR6hzZek
…and many other places on YouTube.
You can also watch it here:
http://www.devilducky.com/media/57946/
Since writing this piece, I’ve e-mailed some new media contacts at NRK to ask if there are any plans for a legal English version. No word yet, though.
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Update (26 Feb. 07): I heard back from a contact at NRK, who says that “NRK has had a lot of questions regarding this clip and are planning to publish it again, with subtitles” - which would certainly be better than having it go on and off YouTube at the whim of the lawyers.
Posted by: Paul Gorbould | 02-21-2007 | 11:02 AM
Posted in: CBC | Teh Internets
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So here I am *still* not sure what in the name of holy heck the ‘actors and writers’ are bitching about when/if content like this gets out there on the Tubes? I can understand those involved in entertainment programming that may or may not be package for resale have a vested interest that they get *their due* somewhere along the line but what about a rather vast category of other interesting yet ephemeral material that could be well served by being intertubed? It’s not like I’m ever going to order a CBC televisions *Quirkiest Newscasts* DvD but I would certainly think it would be nifty to have examples of interesting material available to be seen on an obviously public driven forum like Youtube. Having that same material buried somewhere in a CBC archive (connected or not connected to the interweb) serves no one but a small subset of freakish archive trollers and hardcore CBC nerds who somehow unearth the knowledge that this media is available.
To be honest I tend to find that Youtube is also a very special case as its function is very specific. It’s great for catching little clips of things that peak your interest and frankly would seem to make the viewer *more* likely to seek out the original source. The Quality is invariably so so and it’s not like anyone (sane) would use it as a method to actually try to watch significant chunks of programming.
So I almost always come to the conclusion that what this really comes down to is *control*. Goodness knows that we the corporate overlords hate it when people essentially go out of their way to give us *free advertising*. We are so enveloped in our need to spin every last thing that spews from our satanic mills that the simple thought of our product becoming part of the public milieu is anathema.
Or am I just paranoid?
p.s. Good post man.
Thanks for the thoughtful comments, Grondzilla.
In my experience (and in this particular case as well) it’s seldom the actors and writers themselves who object to having their stuff on the internet. They deserve their cut, sure, but in the words of Cory Doctorow, their enemy is obscurity, not piracy.
No, it’s usually their representative unions fighting on their behalf. And that’s their job, of course, and without it you can bet they’d get no cut at all. But amazingly, there’s still a presiding fear that teh internets are going to change everything, and generate buckets full of money for somebody without content creators getting a slice. It’s the same argument we heard 10 years ago.
To be fair, the major broadcasters and websites haven’t helped much. For every iTunes (which pays the artists) there’s a YouTube (which doesn’t); and because the established system is so adversarial, both unions and corporations go into discussions asking for the moon, get angry and walk away.
I really wish for some sort of deus ex machina, where God or Stephen Harper or Bill Gates would step in and say something like, “All content creators will henceforth be paid 10% more up front and share future revenues. Now everyone stop bitching about format and get back to work.” But that’s unlikely.
I appreciate the practicality of the “long tail” argument - that the internet does well with things that will never have a viable revenue model. Practically speaking, everyone could probably just turn a blind eye to this and let YouTube do its thing. But the rights issues are the same, and so is the bickering.
You are right about the control issue, though. I’ll get myself in trouble if I say anything more than that.
Roger dodger. I can appreciate your position (I suspect). In fact reading this post led me to search around a little and check things like the CBC archives which lo and behold has all kinds of interesting content (I was amused to see that your encounter with the Queen happened to be front and center). The down side is that I would have to do the dredging myself and see if stuff that I *might* be interested in actually is interesting. I really have to say that I tend to end up visiting Youtube and similar services more as a result of linkages like yours rather than hanging around the site and hoping to find nuggets myself(although I’ve done that a few times). Like so many others things Youtube falls into the bounds of the definition, as Ted Sturgeon suggested all those years ago, “Ninety percent of everything is Crap”. I’m particularly puzzled as to how Youtube even survives given that there appears to be no advertising inflicted on simple visitors like myself and users post a gazillion meg of content that must have ungodly server requirements. Where do they get the money? And how was it they are considered worth however many bazillion dollars were paid for the service when Google ate them? I don’t see how it makes any economic sense.
Be that as it may I checked out the ‘March of the Emperors’ which has to be one of the best TV advertising bits I’ve seen in recent memory. Thanks for that.
YouTube’s business model is quite the mystery, no?
From poking around on the internet, opinions are still varied - though you can throw out everything written before it was bought by Google. Most of those pieces concluded that despite claims that YouTube would become “the next Google” and one day go public, it really had no business plan at all.
Google of course has all sorts of revenue generating streams, but none of them figure to have the oomph to even come close to paying for YouTube’s costs. The most interesting suggestion I’ve seen recently is that it’s simply a loss leader for Google. Google obviously wants to become the de facto source for finding all video on the internet, and Google Video may become the portal that points to YouTube content, mixed with all sorts of premium content you can pay for. That way they corner the market on monetized video, by controlling free video. Clever.
Mark Cuban always maintained that it’s still just a Napster waiting to implode when it has to finally deal with copyright lawsuits. I suspect there’s some truth to this, though Google has deep enough pockets to never let anything implode. But there will no doubt be a change in what people can get away with.
What interests me the most is what sort of high-profile partnerships will evolve. I already pointed to CBC’s pilot project with Google Video; I’d be lying if I didn’t say I hadn’t pondered whether the whole CBC Archives site (my employer) shouldn’t just port over to YouTube and have done with it. There are all sorts of reasons why that won’t and probably shouldn’t happen, but you can bet someone is already doing just that. So then YouTube becomes the source of all things video - baby videos, last week’s episode of Lost, music videos, historic footage… why go anywhere else?
Thank You
[…] For those wanting to know more, this video is from a comedy skit done 6 years ago for NRK, a Norwegian broadcaster. They have not been too happy about it being on YouTube despite the celebrity of it garnering over a million views. More about that here. […]