Who's looking after the snowman?

[Victoria Reich <vreich@stanford.edu>]

Dr. David S.H. Rosenthal (not a liblicense subscriber) responds 
to Jim O'Donnell's question about preserving YouTube videos on 
his blog: 
http://blog.dshr.org/2007/10/whos-looking-after-snowman.html

--------

In a post to the liblicense mailing list James O'Donnell, Provost 
of Georgetown University, asks:

    "So when I read ten years from now about this cool debate among
    Democratic candidates that featured video questions from goofy but
    serious viewers, including a snowman concerned about global warming,
    and people were watching it on YouTube for weeks afterwards: how
    will I find it? Who's looking after the snowman?

This is an important question. Clearly, future scholars will not be able
to understand the upcoming election without access to YouTube videos,
blog posts and other ephemera. In this particular case, I believe there
are both business and technical reasons why Provost O'Donnell can feel
somewhat reassured, and legal and library reasons why he should not.

Follow me below the fold for the details.

Here is the pre-debate version
(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-0BPnnvI47Q)of the snowman's video, and
here are the candidates' responses
(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8K8GVAAOzMk). CNN, which broadcast the
debate, has the coverage here
(http://edition.cnn.com/2007/POLITICS/07/23/debate.main/index.html). As
far as I can tell the Internet Archive doesn't collect videos like these.

> From a business point of view, YouTube videos are a business 
asset of Google, and will thus be preserved with more than 
reasonable care and attention. As I argued here 
(http://blog.dshr.org/2007/06/why-preserve-e-journals-to-preserve.html), 
content owned by major publishing corporations (which group now 
includes Google) is at very low risk of accidental loss; the low 
and rapidly decreasing cost per byte of storage makes the 
business decision to keep it available rather than take it down a 
no-brainer. And that is ignoring the other aspects of the Web's 
Long Tail (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Long_Tail) economics 
which mean that the bulk of the revenue comes from the less 
popular content.

Technically, YouTube video is Flash Video 
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flash_Video). It can easily be 
downloaded, for example by this website 
(http://www.techcrunch.com/get-youtube-movie/). The content is in 
a widely used web format that has an open-source player, in this 
case at least two (MPlayer (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MPlayer) 
and VLC (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VLC_media_player)). It is 
thus perfectly feasible to preserve it, and for the reasons I 
describe here 
(http://blog.dshr.org/2007/04/format-obsolescence-scenarios.html) 
the open source players make it extraordinarily unlikely that it 
would not be possible to play the video in 10, or even 30 years. 
If someone collects the video from YouTube and preserves the 
bits, it is highly likely that the bits will be viewable 
indefinitely.

But, will anyone other than Google actually collect and preserve 
the bits? Provost O'Donnell's library might want to do so, but 
the state of copyright law places some tricky legal obstacles in 
the way. Under the DMCA, preserving a copy of copyright content 
requires the copyright owner's permission. Although I heard 
rumors that CNN would release video of the debate under a 
Creative Commons license, on their website there is a normal "All 
Rights Reserved" copyright notice. And on YouTube, there is no 
indication of the copyright status of the videos. A library 
downloading the videos would have to assume it didn't have 
permission to preserve them. It could follow the example of the 
Internet Archive and depend on the "safe harbor" provision, 
complying with any "takedown letters" by removing them. This is a 
sensible approach for the Internet Archive, which aims to be a 
large sample of the Web, but not for the kind of focused 
collections Provost O'Donnell has in mind.

The DMCA, patents and other IP restrictions place another 
obstacle in the way. I verified that an up-to-date Ubuntu Linux 
system using the Totem media player 
(http://www.gnome.org/projects/totem/) plays downloaded copies of 
YouTube videos very happily. Totem uses the GStreamer media 
framework (http://gstreamer.freedesktop.org/) with plugins for 
specific media. Playing the YouTube videos used the FFmpeg 
library (http://ffmpeg.mplayerhq.hu/). As with all software, it 
is possible that some patent holder might claim that it violated 
their patents, or that in some way it could be viewed as evading 
some content protection mechanism as defined by the DMCA. As with 
all open source software, there is no indemnity from a vendor 
against such claims. Media formats are so notorious for such 
patent claims that Ubuntu segregates many media plugins into 
separate classes and provides warnings during the install process 
that the user may be straying into a legal gray area. The 
uncertainty surrounding the legal status is carefully cultivated 
by many players in the media market, as it increases the returns 
they may expect by what are, in many cases, very weak patents and 
content protection mechanisms. Many libraries judge that the 
value of the content they would like to collect doesn't justify 
the legal risks of collecting it.

****