The Academy's pyrrhic victory against YouTube: All the videos are back
Yesterday Variety reported that the Academy sent takedown notices to YouTube, asking them to remove videos from the Oscar performance. The reasoning was unclear -- the Academy sells no DVDs of the show, and is only monetizing five minutes of the vids on oscar.com -- but hell, they did it anyway.
But now the videos are back up. As my friend and former boss Larry Dignan notes, Beyonce is back. So is Jennifer Hudson.
What to do? Mark Cuban is on the right track. He says stop fighting YouTube and instead take advantage of its hosting -- flood the site with crap videos of the Oscars, so users will have to go to Oscar.com.
But that's thinking short term. Eventually (within minutes, probably) those videos will be flagged by users as inappropriate, the good videos will receive more views and better ratings, and YouTube will auto-filter those vids to the top of search results. Then there's the legal aspects of intentionally flooding a site with spam. The Academy would receive a cease-and-desist letter by the next day.
The truth is that the Academy should have partnered with YouTube to showcase a wide variety of videos, much like CBS did with the Super Bowl commercials. The Academy was probably prevented from doing so by their agreements with ABC, which doesn't have an agreement with YouTube. If that's indeed the case, then the Academy should have struck a deal with ABC to show videos. Or, better yet, make their own videos more user-friendly.
As it stands now, this is trench warfare. YouTube isn't breaking the law because the law is structured so that they have no apparent vulnerability. But the networks and orgs like the Academy aren't prepared to take advantage of third-party hosting, nor do they necessarily want to. This situation is headed for the courtroom. Maybe the Academy is just the party needed to force a legal battle.
