Nintendo co-opts advertisements on Youtube videos of their games

[Brian]

Ripped from slashdot:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-22552756

I personally am having trouble identifying Nintendo as the 'bad guy' here.  They own the copyrights, and an LP goes beyond fair use -- way beyond.  Basically, if the choice is between them having the video taken down, or co-opting the advertising proceeds and leaving the video up, this really strikes me as the less evil option.  That being said, it's kind of absurd to me that people are into making LPs for money; what happened to fan works as a labor of love?  Wouldn't it be better to not have revenue generating adds on your LP in the first place?

I don't know.

What do you think?

[Muphrid]

Does it say in the article that these videos already had advertisements in the first place, and that the users who uploaded them were making money in the process?

[Empyrean]

I don't like the concept of IP in the first place so I view this whole thing with mild disfavor, but the legal question of whether a Let's Play is Fair Use hinges mostly on whether the Let's Player is making money off of it. Commercial use of someone else's IP is a lot harder to pass off as Fair Use.

[Dracos]

I remember some review company that both gave the last game I worked on a shitty review and then uploaded a let's play of the entire game directing people to their site the day the review embargo was lifted, weeks before anyone could actually play the game.

It quite soured my view on let's plays in a commercial sense.  It's hard to be polite about the equivalent of setting up a tripod video camera and recording a preview copy of a movie and then flinging it on every major video sharing service.

Some people are into let's plays to be awesome fans or show neat things.  That's cool.
Some people are there because it drives commercial traffic their way and produces ad revenue.  That's for the most part super obnoxious.

This hurts the latter group and does nothing to the former group.  It does make things a bit more difficult for small group media folks, but you know what?  most of those guys are jerks and can make the money without broadcasting large chunks of the game.  I doubt this will hit anyone just showing small amounts of footage while blogging about it instead of 20-30 minute chunks of gameplay strung together of an entire product with someone talking over it.

Also, anyone suggesting that releasing videos of entire games deserves to be a real livelihood probably is probably a jackass :\  Transformative performance art needs to do a little bit more and also not release a whole shit-ton of content that they don't own.

[Brian]

It's hard to be polite about the equivalent of setting up a tripod video camera and recording a preview copy of a movie "with your own commentary drowning out the original sound track" and then flinging it on every major video sharing service.

Slightly edited your line, there -- but yeah.

I was a bit surprised to see the (nearly) universally, "Nintendo is EVIL because of this!" angle in articles about it, but find that my view aligns with yours.

[JonBob]

If the quantity threshold is high enough, I don't see why the IP holders shouldn't be able to dictate if the video is taken down or the revenue goes to them. I do think that Nintendo could have gone with a more middle ground and taken a portion of the proceeds instead of all of it.

[Dracos]

How, jonbob?

It's unlikely that Youtube has a revenue sharing system built into content controls.  I mean, maybe that do, but that'd be incredibly foresight given the usual audience for this mechanism is media creation companies who are having their stuff rebroadcast without any recompensation (Like, for instance, is what is happening for Nintendo).

Odds are Nintendo had 3 options:
1)Ignore it entirely.
2)Remove the content entirely (and potentially end with the accounts getting banned as Youtube reacts to accounts being tagged for multiple content violations).
3)Indicate that all money being made using their content belongs to them.

They chose 3, and really of the options, 3 is the least damaging active option.

Also, as much as people say "Seeing it excites them to go get it themselves", there's the reverse as well:  "I've already watched this for 4-8 hours.  It was cool, thrilling, etc...  Do I want to go buy this or this other unknown cool, thrilling, experience?  Well, my life is limited, so I'll go with the new one."

People build up toward having cool new experiences, and vents that let them feel they've 'gotten it' will often result in them deciding they don't need to go get the real thing.  Demos apparently have this problem tremendously.

[JonBob]

Uh... I mostly agree with Nintendo's actions, so I'm not sure what I said that indicated otherwise. It is their content and it is giving away the experience you might have in-game. I was just thinking that a 4th option (a lesser form of #3) would have been more ideal made fewer waves. But between those 3, yeah, their choice was likely the best.

[Dracos]

Does it say in the article that these videos already had advertisements in the first place, and that the users who uploaded them were making money in the process?

To my awareness, effectively all Youtube videos have advertisements in them.  At some point they apparently set it up for content creators to make money off of ads from watches.

[Dracos]

Uh... I mostly agree with Nintendo's actions, so I'm not sure what I said that indicated otherwise. It is their content and it is giving away the experience you might have in-game. I was just thinking that a 4th option (a lesser form of #3) would have been more ideal made fewer waves. But between those 3, yeah, their choice was likely the best.

Yeah, I was more commenting that the hypothetical option 4 probably didn't exist for them to choose.

[Muphrid]

Does it say in the article that these videos already had advertisements in the first place, and that the users who uploaded them were making money in the process?

To my awareness, effectively all Youtube videos have advertisements in them.  At some point they apparently set it up for content creators to make money off of ads from watches.

But to my knowledge, you have to opt-in to enable this feature.  I used to post Detective Conan clips and episode previews on youtube before the rights holders (or their content bots) got wind of it and slapped me with a couple copyright violations.  Nevertheless, I purposefully chose not to enable AdSense on my videos because, while I wanted to share that media with people--clips like that got me interested in the series in the first place--I felt it was much more tenuous legal ground to make money off something I had no rights to.

It may be things have changed since then, but what I want to point out is that Nintendo may be going beyond merely taking the ad revenue from people who are already making money off their property.  I'm suggesting they may be identifying videos that have no ads attached to them, attaching ads to them, and also taking all the money that results.

[Dracos]

Maybe.  I don't post enough videos to know.

I can't see youtube not having its standard ad stuff going, if only to fund its own cost of bandwidth in sending all of these videos to people.  That seems more plausible to me than adSense being manually turned on for everything, even tiny little things.  Dunno.