Discussion»Questions»Computers and the Internet» If you post on YouTube a video that you personally created, legally speaking, who has ownership rights of the content from that point on?
Thank you, however, I didn’t ask from the standpoint of it being applicable to me or to my needs. I rarely even look at anything on YouTube, and I certainly have never posted anything there, nor do I think I ever will. I asked the question out of idle curiosity, a passing thought during a moment of boredom and of barrage-posting of new questions here. ~
YouTube: Let’s have a look at the Terms of Use and see. As is typical, you agree to the terms of service just by signing up for a YouTube account or visiting the YouTube website. “Content” on YouTube is anything a user uploads, including sounds, text, video, and graphics. When you upload your content to YouTube, you are granting them a “worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free, sublicenseable and transferable license to use, reproduce, distribute, prepare derivative works of, display, and perform the Content in connection with the Service” and even the right to create “derivative works” from your content, which means that they can slice and dice it and make new content from it. You’re also granting other users of YouTube the right to “to use, reproduce, distribute, display and perform such Content as permitted through the functionality of the Service.” The license is perpetual and irrevocable, and they can keep copies of everything you upload forever on their servers, even if you delete it.
It's pretty much the same across the major social-media trade; and there has been a lot of trouble with some sites refusing out of hand to give back deceased users' material to the families, or to close the accounts.
Interestingly, that YouTube licence says it not only has it assumed the right to do whatever it damn' well wants with your material, however destructive; but it also has no qualms about anyone else using it. So it is not taking copyright, unlike some photographic sites that use anti-copying protection.
That may be because it does not make money from your contributions, but nor is it ever going to pay you anything for them.
Instead it makes money from chopping them into one-minute segments and selling the interruptions to the vast number of advertising-agencies there are, to fill with childish, meretricious guff of no relevance to the video at all.
Thriftymaid 