When using YouTube jeopardizes your own content rights, leverage, and bargaining power

YouTube can be an attractive place to host your video work, especially since YouTube doesn’t charge you any money. Some content producers —who don’t (yet) have their own contracted unlimited web server— choose to use YouTube in order to avoid excessive bandwidth surcharges from their current web host, and then embed that video in their own website. Other producers use the YouTube service as a public gallery, hoping to get interest in their products or services. Many of those producers are oblivious to the fact that when uploading content on YouTube’s servers, they are granting YouTube a perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free, sublicenseable and transferable license to use, reproduce, distribute, prepare derivative works, display, and perform the content. You may imagine that there are cases where this can jeopardize your copyright, leverage, and bargaining power in any subsequent transaction with a potential purchase of the material or concept. In this article, I’ll explore the details, and discuss when I believe it makes sense to use YouTube, and when it makes more sense to use your own contracted unlimited web hosting service. (Read the rest here…)