YouTube Terms and Conditions…I Accept?!

Posted on January 17, 2015

YouTube. It’s the site you visit when you need to learn how to fix something, want to watch adorable cat videos, and see videos that will make you laugh until you cry. People think of YouTube as an entertainment site that even helps people become famous. I mean, who doesn’t want to have one of your videos go viral? But what about the legal liabilities of YouTube and its users? Who owns those videos and who has the right to promote them? Let’s take a look into YouTube’s equally thrilling and exciting terms and conditions!

Like most other social media sites, the terms and conditions are really boring. Black and white copy (and I mean a TON of it) written in terms that lawyers understand. One thing that stood out to me was that as a user, you are not allowed to show a YouTube video on an embedded media player. I see people everyday use third party applications to download the YouTube videos directly onto their devices. I wonder how YouTube is patrolling this? Is there any consequences? If so, I didn’t see them in the terms and conditions. If you know, please inform me!

As far as content rights go, YouTube makes it very clear that you as the content uploader have the rights to your content: “For clarity, you retain all of your ownership rights in your Content”. They can, however, use your content in ways that they feel necessary “by submitting Content to YouTube, you hereby grant YouTube a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free, sublicenseable and transferable license to use, reproduce, distribute, prepare derivative works of…” Based off of reviewing Twitter and Facebook’s terms and conditions, this is apparently a fairly common industry practice. Digital copyright laws and regulations are also discussed in the terms and conditions. Although I think that it was a good thing for YouTube to include these in the terms and conditions, it added an extra layer on complication to them.

The average YouTube user doesn’t understand what is really being said in the terms and conditions. I feel that this is a very negative thing for the user and is unethical. Why would you as a company create a document to protect your site that the majority of users can’t even understand? It feels like YouTube is trying to hide how they operate from the users. If users don’t understand how their content may be used or distributed, they could be taken advantage of. What do you think? Is the language used in YouTube’s terms and conditions too much for the general user?