What’s going on with Veoh?
Published by Collaborative Effort on 8 Apr 2006 at 3:26 pm.
11 Comments.
Filed under Vlog News.
The Yahoo Videoblogging Group is all a-buzz with activity today around the subject of video-hijacking. A company named Veoh, which calls itself “The First Internet Television Peercasting Network,” has been collecting video from all over the Web, copying it to their servers and serving it up as Veoh “shows” without giving credit to the original content creator.
Videobloggers put blood, sweat and tears into their videos and then put them out for the world to access on their own terms. Videobloggers’ use of RSS allows people to subscribe to videos in FireANT, iTunes or Mefeedia, it allows the video to be searched in Yahoo! Video Search. RSS, as a technology, is extremely useful. Unfortunately, it is also exploitable. Veoh has used the very same RSS to hijack videobloggers’ valuable content and trap it in Veoh’s walled garden.
Here’s how it seems to work:
- Veoh spiders the Web to find lists of RSS feeds that contain video enclosures.
- Veoh databases each feed as it is discovered and creates a “shadow” video blog to correspond with the feed. No credit or link-backs are included on the shadow blog.
- Veoh crawls the feeds on a regular basis to find newly shared videoblog episodes. They download each episode, transcode the file from the original Quicktime, Windows Media or Flash video to Veoh’s own Flash video.
- Veoh locks down the video in their Flash player.
- Veoh adds the new Flash video file to the “shadow” video blog corresponding to the original feed they found. No link is provided back to the original location of the episode.
- A visitor comes to Veoh, finds a video blog, and falls under the mistaken impression that the creator of the blog originally uploaded the video to Veoh. Clearly, Veoh must be a good service if it’s getting content that’s this good!
- Veoh profits monetarily from increased visibility caused by an unnatural wealth of content.
When you go to Josh Leo’s Blog you see Josh’s writing, his layout, his identity and his own unique brand. Veoh has scraped all of Josh’s video content and put it on their own site. They’ve created a shadow Josh Leo Blog all their own. The shadow Josh Leo Blog contains none of Josh’s writing, none of his identity, none of his brand, and no links to anywhere you can find those things. Aside from the title of the Veoh “video series” you would never even know a guy named Josh Leo existed.
This wouldn’t be so bad if Josh had authorized this or signed up for it. Instead, Veoh’s strategy appears to be to take the content and ask questions later. Apparently they think it’s easier to ask for forgiveness than permission. A videoblogger who has had his content taken by Veoh and placed in a shadow Veoh videoblog can “opt out” of their terms of use and have their content removed from Veoh’s service. That’s sort of like a thief coming into your house, stealing your TV and then saying it’s okay because if you ask nicely they’ll give it back.
Some vloggers don’t care if their work is copied without attribution by someone looking to make a fast buck. They just want as many people as possible to watch it.
Today Andrew Michael Baron of Rocketboom wrote:
“Instead of rejecting the sytem though, why not use the system to be more creative and effective in advertising? For instance, if you made an advertisement that explained where to go and what to do INSIDE OF THE VIDEO and did not depend on the extra metadata, you could let them take it and it would increase your reach for new clients. You could let everyone have it and encourage people to spread it around and share it because that would increase the reach of your advertising.”
If every vlogger simply wanted as many people as possible to watch their videos, didn’t care about tracking those figures and actually embedded ads pointing back to their Web pages in their videos, Veoh would be in a much better position now. Not every vlogger thinks that way, though. Vloggers own the copyright over their videos, and they have the same rights as any other copyright holder from Disney to NBC.
Vloggers aren’t the only ones finding that their videos have been hijacked by Veoh. Veoh has also been crawling and copying the entire video catalogs of rival hosting services including blip.tv, OurMedia, Vidilife and Vimeo. They have essentially been taking all the video uploaded to the Internet and appropriating it for their own use.
In a phone conversation on Friday Mike Hudack of blip.tv, asked Veoh’s CEO to remove all of the videos that Veoh had scraped from Blip. As of today, only the main Blip feed has been removed. The individual feeds of all of Blip’s users remain stockpiled over at Veoh.
Andreas Haugstrup dug through the old posts of the Yahoo Videoblogging group and found some of Veoh’s prior interactions with the group.
August 3,2005: Dmitry Shapiro wrote,
“Our investors are very high profile in the media space, so we have access to lots of maistream media, but our primary focus is the Long Tail of video. We want Independent News, How-To shows, Reality Shows, Crazy Stuff (adult allowed), Political Commentary (someone’s got to do a parity of Bill O’Reilley), Comedy, etc.”
On August 3, Dmitry wrote,
“In a nutshell, we are an Internet Television Network, that allows anyone to broadcast tv-grade, full-screen video/audio to the world. We are looking for HIGH QUALITY, FULL SCREEN video, encoded at about 400 MB per hour using MPEG 4, DivX preferred. You can upload it to our system, or we can suck it down from your RSS feed, but we want the big files, not the stuff that you put on your web server, or in your blog for browser-based delivery. We see vloggers consolidating a number of vlog entries into a larger “episode” of their show, and making it available in full-screen tv-quality to their subscribers.”
On August 10, 2005 Dmitry posted,
“We will NOT transcode your video like Google does,
and will make it available in its native form.”
On August 19th, Vloggers reported that they were getting e-mail and comment spam from Veoh.
More recently on Friday April 7, Dmitry re-joined the group and posted a response to allegations that Veoh was stealing videobloggers’ content:
“It is not our intention to steal anyone’s content. We are simply trying to create a compelling service for video producers of all kinds, with a big focus on enabling video bloggers to be free of restrictions to broadcast. In fact, we did consider simply creating a site where we would link to videoblogs, but felt that this may cause you to experience significant costs. The reason we transcode the content is to offload those costs from you to us. Maybe this is not the right thing to do. We are open to your comments, and will obey your wishes.”
Peter van Dijck, who runs Mefeedia and is a founder of the Videoblogging Group, posted the following to the group:
“Here’s what I want to see Veoh do:
1) Stop spidering feeds today (and I mean today). Just turn it off for a few weeks while this gets figured out.
2) Remove ALL videos you gathered by spidering. Only add videos back in if the feed owner claims the feed and gives permission for that. Transcoding and hosting should be opt-in. I think that’s clear.”
Peter’s request makes a lot of sense, but Veoh has yet to respond to it.
There is, incidentally, a protocol for Web-based aggregation of video content. There is a way to do it without getting in trouble. Guidelines include:
- Always keep video files in their original format to preserve the creator’s intended viewer experience. Only transcode or “down-res” a video file with the creator’s permission.
- Always link the “collection” of content (generally a videoblog) back to its creator. If a video comes from Josh Leo’s blog there should be a prominent link to Josh Leo’s blog on every page including content from or mentioning the collection.
- Always serve aggregated video files from their original hosts so that the original hosting service can track statistics and serve ads if the user chooses to do so.
- Always link from the video playback page to the page the video was originally published on. This is often called the “permalink”. So If Josh originally posted his video to http://joshleo.com/my-video/ the video view page in the aggregator must link to that URL with an indication that the video itself and more information about the video can be found there.
This episode also begins to a new chapter in the copyright wars once again engulfing the Web. Until this weekend it appeared that YouTube was the reigning champion in copyright infringement, with some estimating that 65% of their content is captured from television. YouTube serves up tens of thousands of copyrighted videos every day, but those videos were not put online by YouTube. Individuals did that. In YouTube’s case they can at least argue that they made no effort to acquire copyrighted material, and that it’s the user’s fault for uploading it in the first place.
Veoh can make no such claim. They appear to be actively seeking out, downloading and redistributing copyrighted material as a matter of active corporate policy and strategy. They don’t risk being sued as a copyright circumvention platform… they risk being sued as pirates. Will they be the first VC-backed company to suffer such a fate?
There’s another, ancillary, question to be considered as well: When is it OK to use open APIs and syndication standards and the information provided through them for your own commercial purpose? What protection can an independent video producer expect when they release their videos through RSS as a service to their viewers? Should they simply resign themselves to the unfortunate prospect of continued piracy, by one company after another? Unlike the record companies, after all, videobloggers don’t have a trade group with which to employ white shoe law firms.
Eric and Chuck are also blogging about this.
the Tao of David » Blog Archive » VEOH - thieving bastards on 8 Apr 2006 at 4:08 pm: 1
[…] More about this here and here and here and here.Tags: veoh.com, copyright violation, theives, theft, infringement […]
David on 8 Apr 2006 at 4:13 pm: 2
That article just plain rocked. Thank you for voicing this!
Signed,
A vlogger who had his videos stolen by VEOH
Anne Walk on 8 Apr 2006 at 8:19 pm: 3
we’ve been following the story since Josh Leo first posted to the group about finding his stuff on Veoh, yesterday morning, and have been contacted a few times now by dmitry who asked us to advocate on his behalf to the group. we refused.
we will continue coverage for as long as this issue continues.
anne walk
loadedpun.com
GigaOM : » Veoh Vs Video Bloggers on 9 Apr 2006 at 9:10 am: 4
[…] Video bloggers are up in arms against Veoh, an online video service. Why? Because many say that the company is taking their video content, downloading it, transcoding and hosting it on their (Veoh) sites without anyone’s permission. The news of this story first started to show up in Yahoo VideoBlogging Group, and then on We The Media website. Veoh has used the very same RSS to hijack videobloggers’ valuable content and trap it in Veoh’s walled garden. Vloggers own the copyright over their videos, and they have the same rights as any other copyright holder from Disney to NBC. […]
Blip Blog on 9 Apr 2006 at 11:11 am: 5
[…] By now you are probably aware of the fact that Veoh, a video hosting company, has been aggregating videos from around the Web and appropriating them as their own without credit to the original content producers. I won’t go into the specifics of the situation because there is an excellent article at We Are The Media summarizing the situation, along with a great post at GigaOM. […]
Zelig » Blog Archive » Parasites of the Blogosphere: an AdDense problem on 9 Apr 2006 at 11:58 pm: 6
[…] This morning I was reading the Veoh Vs Video Bloggers post on Om Malik’s Blog; it is about unauthorized videoblog’s content acquisition and republishing. I followed the link to the We The Media website where the story is more detailed and I recommend reading this as it gives you enough information for start making up your mind about this rising phenomenon. What phenomenon? Om Malik called it credit-less remixing or Wholesale Blog Plagiarism, or in other terms, the activity of the parasites of the blogsphere. A parasite is defined as […]
Susan on 10 Apr 2006 at 9:36 am: 7
Very interesting… you see, this morning, my content, ALL of it, was on veoh… but now it appears to be gone… is something good happening?
jennifer on 10 Apr 2006 at 10:56 am: 8
This article exemplifies the best reporting out there in the vlogosphere. It’s too bad that it has to be about something so insideous as stolen property and disrespect to such a fantastic community. Keep up the good fight!
Digitaler Film » Internet Videos verlinken. on 20 Apr 2006 at 5:10 am: 9
[…] Vor kurzem gab es einige Aufregung unter den Videobloggern, weil Veoh RSS Feeds sowie ganze Seiten gespidert und die Videos von dort ohne Einverständnis der Blogger auf seine eigene Seite geladen hat. Veoh erstellte sogennante Schatten-Feeds der Videoblogs, die ohne Hinweis auf den eigentlichen Autor und die original Seite gelistet wurden. Auf massiven Druck der Blogger hat Veoh die “geklauten” Videos vom Netz genommen und hostet nun nur noch direkt bei Veoh hochgeladene Videos oder solche Feeds, die von den Bloggern selbst freigeschalten wurde. Diese schnelle Reaktion hängt wohl mit den $12,5 Millionen zusammen, die Veoh von Michael Eisner (ehemaliger Disney Chef), Time Warner und anderen in einer zweiten Founding Runde bekommen hat. In einem offenen Brief an die Videoblogger hat Veoh Chef Dmitry Shapiro seine Gründe für das Vorgehen nochmals dargelegt und versucht die Wogen zu glätten. Veoh gehe es nicht darum die Inhalte zu stehlen, meint Shapiro, sondern die Blogger von den Traffickosten zu entlasten und so dafür zu sorgen, dass hochauflösende Videos ins Internet kommen. Und gerade hochauflösende Clips ins Internet zu bringen ist das erklärte Ziel von Veoh (We are looking for HIGH QUALITY, FULL SCREEN video, encoded at about 400 MB per hour using MPEG 4, DivX preferred.). […]
Free Videos All Day Long on 28 Mar 2008 at 3:46 am: 10
It Was free to begin with,Its still free on veoh
the only difference is your crying about it.
Amber on 2 Apr 2008 at 6:51 am: 11
I like Veoh. I like watching Death Note when I can’t watch it on Saturdays at 12:00 in the morning. I don’t really care if they copy my videos or anyone elses. Everyone needs to stop being so selfish. They should be happy that people at Veoh are spreading the joy of their videos.