A Country Bumpkin Offering Sunshine

The following video I uploaded onto YouTube was a student assignment that three classmates and I made in 2002 while I was studying filmmaking at a community college in San Francisco for fun.


I have an account with YouTube and partly post my own small video projects. However, I do also upload some very stunning and great segments of those films I love and adore. Yeah, you would challenge me now: why don't I show my respect to those works and leave them in theaters, DVDs, at video stores, television stations, Hi Definition cable…etc since I adore those filmmakers and artists that much?!

This interesting debate is worthy for discussions. We as human beings all have basic desires to share or comment on things we have experienced. Videos and films are such a vivid medium to be transferred onto the internet for us to express our feelings and opinions. Sometimes, we can make our own videos or films; but, most of time, we like to introduce other intelligent people's works and show our appreciation to people who might not know about those works. As far as I understand, the nature of copyright law is to prevent greedy people from illegally selling/trading copyright protected works for profit. As long as there is no such act, a person living on earth should also have the right to critique, comment on, and teach with other people's works with no commercial purpose - even without permission.

Some copyright owners prefer a lot of discussions with their works partly shown; some are only interested in audience and fans spending money on buying them. We, as the audience can only guess what kind of copyright owners they are by the content, style, and social issues they address within their artwork; there is no certainty until the particular artist/copyright owner reveals her/his position. For instance, a Japanese music composer, Hideki Matsutake and a group of music, film and television associates held a news conference in Tokyo to officially ask Google/YouTube to immediately stop and alter the current users’ policy for uploading music and videos. Now, we know what kind of copyright owners those people are, I would suggest people who uploaded Hideki Matsutake's music videos to remove them as soon as possible. Also, is it possible for YouTube to start an entry for copyright owners who don't want their work to be seen on YouTube to sing up and let users to search for? This way, users might be able to help with avoiding getting YouTube in similar trouble.

I by no means wish to insult those people in Japan attacking Google/YouTube now; there could be a lot of royalties for a copyright owner to collect without doing anything but forcing media (including websites) to pay - let’s say one cent (US currency) per click/view - 100 thousand dollars for 1 million clicks. Big money, huh? Greedy coalitions and some artists see where the money could be – YouTube.

Maybe, my reasoning is not very fair because I don’t need a lot of money to live on this earth and am not earning my living by creating things or selling copyrights. What I do know is that I appreciate artists who can take people’s admiration on YouTube as their reward - and free promotion.