"Pictures from YouTube"

I've seen this a few times recently and it annoys me. Broadcasters using footage that somebody has uploaded to YouTube and lazily sticking a "Pictures from YouTube" aston on it rather than identifying and naming the individual who took the footage.

Calendar did it today with some cracking footage of a local factory fire. The BBC were naming the guy who filmed it and seemed to have to gone to the trouble of getting the original footage from him rather than using the compressed stuff on YouTube.

Strictly speaking it's just about allowed under YouTube's terms and conditions in the rights you give away by uploading videos, but it seems like very lazy journalism

Although I haven't seen them do it for a few years, BBC South East today used to have 'Pictures from the Internet'. I guess its no worse than the old 'viewers pictures' or 'amateur video' from the pre-YouTube days but sometimes you might want to watch the pictures for yourself which is a lot easier if you know what YouTube channel it is on.

London Tonight seem to do it a fair bit, and not just news events they'll often snatch a clip of one of their 'celebrity' guests directly from You Tube and credit it as such.

True, but "viewer's pictures" are generally supplied to the broadcaster by the person who filmed it, with their blessing that they be broadcast. "Pictures from YouTube" are just nicked from the web I would imagine.

Yes, a colleague of mine tried to get away with this the other week - with footage of a major TV show. Even when I explained that the credit should be the owner of the content he didn't get it. It's down to a mixture of lazyness and a lack of common sense on the journalist's part.

How would the broadcasters get to find out who recorded the footage who uploaded it to youtube?

EDIT. Ignore that. I forgot that there's a messaging facility on youtube lol

Ah - this is one of my pet subjects.

I made a film for Newswatch a few months ago about this very issue after BBC London News lifted some video of mine from YouTube and credited it as described above.

The verdict seemed to be that if the video was of a contemporaneous news event they could have got away with using it at the time for the purposes of news reporting, but as (in my case) it was just to add visual interest to a story that was only tangentially related to the footage and shouldn't have been run.

My gripe was not that I particularly minded the BBC using my video, but I had not by the mere act of uploading it to YouTube granted them any sort of licence to use it. YouTube's T&Cs say that material shouldn't be broadcast.

And, as Steve says, had the BBC bothered to ask, I would have happily supplied them with the original footage rather than the poor-quality YouTube version.

There is a real issue about how traditional broadcasters and publishers use material found on the internet (particularly still pics and videos), how they attribute it and how they pay for it.

See this recent involving the Daily Mail http://just-do-it.org.uk/?p=863

IMHO it would be good if YouTube allowed content creators to set and display licensing terms for their videos in the same way that Flickr does with images.

Though as a high proportion of videos contain images/audio owned by a third party, it would no doubt be a minefield.

Yes, and if it's a clip of a TV show you just work out who makes it

Interesting link, thanks for that. The BBC had a similar situation recently with a photo nicked from flickr on the Birmingham CSO camera background.

Here's another incident in the same vein:

http://technicalfault.net/2010/01/11/bbc-fail-attribute-creative-commons-manchester-oxford-road/

Yep - unless Youtube actually own the copyright for the content the "Pictures from Youtube" credit is meaningless. If you are fair dealing (for Criticism & Review or Reporting Current Events) you have to credit the copyright holder - which means the rights owner (though you don't have to contact them to use it under Fair Dealing - though Fair Dealing isn't universally applicable to all uses of content)

If a clip from Corrie has been uploaded to Youtube by a viewer - you can't just use it with "Pictures from Youtube" slapped on...

Red Dwarf actor Robert Llewellyn was angered by the showing of some of his youtube footage without consent last year.

http://www.how-do.co.uk/north-west-media-news/north-west-broadcasting/robert-llewellyn-gets-miffed-at-north-west-tonight-for-using-his-dad-dancing-200906105583/