Uploading a video to You Tube is supposed to be the simplest part of the process but for me this time is turned out to be the most problematic. For the sound track I had used three tracks from the Nine Inch Nails album Ghosts I-IV. Trent Reznor and the band released this album free to the Internet under the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike license. That basically means "You are free to share, to copy, distribute and transmit the work under the following conditions: You must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author or licensor, you may not use this work for commercial purposes and if you alter, transform, or build upon this work, you may distribute the resulting work only under the same or similar license to this one". 36 tracks of free wide ranging ambient music with no vocals is perfect for making this sort of video but the You Tube system disagreed.
After uploading the video I saw the message "Matched third party content" in my account. I wasn't sure what that meant until I searched for it (email notification came later). They've got some kind of system at You Tube which automatically checks audio for copyrighted material. They must have a huge bank of mp3s to compare every video upload to. I'm surprised they did it so quickly, though I guess they are part of Google now. Once a video has been tagged with third party content they automatically show adverts on the page which I'd be fine with if it was true. I'm well aware that copyright is a big issue on the Internet these days. I'd picked those tracks on purpose because of their creative commons status hoping to avoid any copyright issues and as far I understood the game play clips would be considered "fair use". So I thought I would be in the clear. You Tube does have a system in place to dispute copyright claims—which I have done—but that has to wait for a response from whomever is running the Nine Inch Nails You Tube account.
That wasn't even the end of the story! In addition to those problems there was a technical error with my video. When you upload a video to You Tube it is transcoded into their own format. However there was something that process didn't like about my video which completely messed it up to the point where it was not even watchable. Low quality, all blocky with colour smearing and flickering. Any other time I would have simply deleted the video and tried again but because of the copyright dispute I have to leave it in place. If I uploaded it again I'd have to start the whole process again and possibly end up with a bad mark on my account. So for now that video has been marked private. I've been talking with some nice people on the You Tube support forum today and we've come up with some ideas as to why it came out at such a low quality. Next time should be better.
I'm now calling this my "pilot" episode. I've learnt a lot about copyright and encoding while doing this. I'll do an official "episode 1" next month with some better music, I'll stick to the amateur creative commons stuff. The final question was what to do with the current video. Changing the music wasn't an option. In a video like this the audio and visuals are so tied together that neither works without the other. It's just a simple compilation of video clips set to music, hardly innovative I know, but I wanted to do something with it. Luckily I operate and maintain many Internet servers all over the world, so I decided to simply host it myself as I still believe I'm fine with regards to copyright. It won't get the extra exposure You Tube brings but at least it will be available and it's taught me a lot for next time.
You can find it here: http://www.slayweb.com/momentsofgaming/
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