Lawyers Bring User-Generated Content Sites to the Stand at Annual Seminar

Authored by Scott Goldberg on October 2, 2006 - 8:37am.

The California Lawyers for the Arts’ presentation, “Life After YouTube: The Benefits & Perils of User-Generated Content (UGC)” took place at the group’s annual Loyola Law School Seminar on September 30 in front of an unexpected audience. A show of hands revealed that less than one-quarter (that were willing to admit it, anyway) were lawyers. The rest: independent filmmakers and musicians, weary of the risks associated with posting their work on the Internet.

Pirates, as we know, aren’t the only ones interested in adding content to the uploading orgy on UGC sites like YouTube, MySpace, Facebook, Yahoo!, Grooper, Google, and Heavy. Artists of all kinds have come to see that UGC represents an opportunity for mass reach and instant appeal never previously enjoyed. The market for talent has been perfected, in a way, making the job of finding new musicians and filmmakers easier than ever. Lilly Allen, for example, the recording artist discovered on MySpace, was signed last December by the label Parlophone, and with every artist like her plucked from obscurity overnight, thousands of others join the feeding frenzy with no knowledge of the risks, only to find the UGC sites are more like a shark tank than a performance venue.

Not that any of it should come as a surprise, nor is there much that can, or should, be done about it. Filmmakers and musicians must educate themselves on the language the UGC sites have crafted in their licensing agreements and be able to decipher which are favorable and which are not. YouTube, Grooper, and Heavy, for instance, are considered the worst for the content owner, according to presenter Jennifer Burke Sylva, while Yahoo! and Google have a more protective slant. Regardless of the site, however, the bottom line, according to Ms. Sylva, is, “If you’ve spent hours and money on your work, maybe you shouldn’t post it.”

And that, in my opinion, seems like bad advice, nor does it appear many will follow it.

UGC companies have done their best to present themselves as nothing more than a new platform for content creators. They’re relatively transparent about the fact that content uploaded to their sites becomes unprotected, and most of them explicitly ask the uploader to waive future monetary claims for a clip that brings the site a large amount of eyeballs. I do believe that it would behoove UGC sites to craft language encouraging filmmakers to upload content with the promise of royalty compensation if certain traffic numbers are met, because the overall quality level of their content will improve, but that’s a different discussion for a different time. For now, UGC sites are, in part, simply a talent show, and some of the lucky contestants will be fortunate enough to see career advancement as a direct result. Taking things any further for content creators would be fighting an uphill battle, one that is only too easy for a lawyer to argue.

The takeaway for filmmakers: keep making content, post it anywhere you can, and roll the dice. UGC sites aren’t likely to be the point of discovery and the launch of your career, but they can be a decent kick start. As Ms. Sylva pointed out, just make sure the UGC site provides some kind of digital rights management (DRM) and the ability to watermark your work, so the traffic that reaches your clips recognizes who made it. Though you’re almost guaranteed to lose the money you spent on the film (and time, as is its nature, is always unrecoverable), it could be the small investment needed to create bigger opportunities. Not a bad advantage.