Who Owns Your Video When You Upload It To YouTube?

What are your rights as to content that you share on social media? Do you lose your rights to media that you share on YouTube?

This is Copyright Week. I'm going to be spending the next five days actually today and the next four days talking about copyright law now. Yes, I know. I run a website called TrademarkDoctor.net. But given that people just don't understand the difference between a trademark and a copyright and a patent, what the heck does it matter? This week I'm talking about copyright law because it's something that's really important, especially to online creators.

So what are we going to talk about? Well, I've already done some preliminary videos about things like what is a copyright? And I want to focus a little bit more on some practical stuff. So today I want to talk about who owns your video. When you uploaded to YouTube, do you give up all of your rights as a creator when you upload it? Well, the answer is in the terms of service. Right now, copyright law gives you, as the creator, the exclusive right to distribute and reproduce and create derivative works from your original work.

But if you want to use certain online platforms, then you're bound by their terms of service. That's one of the conditions that they impose for the privilege of using their platform. So they say basically, hey, you want to play in our sandbox, you've got to follow our rules. So I went and looked at the YouTube terms of service, which I'm sure nobody does, because honestly, who reads the terms of service, they're like a bazillion pages long and written in legalese and it doesn't matter.

You just want to use the platform. So you upload your video, you check the box, you check the box that says, yes, I agree with the terms of service. You upload your video, you're good to go. It's social media. Everybody uses it. Right. OK, well, what are you really giving up now? You can kind of analogize, you can analogize your intellectual property rights to a bundle of sticks. So you have this bundle and you can give away certain sticks and keep others.

So one of the sticks that you give away when you upload your video to YouTube is you're giving them the right to replay over and over again your video on their platform and you're giving them the right to distribute it on their platform. So you're giving away the exclusive right to do certain things with your content. What else? So let me just tell you what it says, it says, content is anything that the user uploads. And when you upload it, you are granting them, and I quote, a worldwide non-exclusive royalty free sub-licensable, which means they can transfer it to other people and transferable license to use, reproduce, distribute, prepare derivative works of display and perform the content in connection with the service.

The service -- capital S -- being YouTube's video uploading and playback service. And also, you can't sell ads on your YouTube videos, you can monetize it within their platform. But if you sell, you know Joe Blow's Cafe down the street, a little video ad in your video, that's verboten officially by YouTube rules. What else do I need to tell you? Should you be worried about this? No. I mean, if you're worried about it, then don't upload your stuff.

Like I said, they make you agree to their terms to play in their sandbox. So if you don't want to play, you don't have to. But you're going to be shut out of their social media channel. Now, if you really wanted to maintain control over your videos, one of the things that you could do, like say you have a blog or a website, one of the things that you could do is instead of uploading it to YouTube, you could actually embed as a media file in your website.

The only problem with that is that it makes the page load really slowly. So that's why these embedding services like YouTube are used so much, because they have the video player and you're actually not having to upload all that content to your website and have it play and use your data transfer bits every time somebody plays it. So that's why people use YouTube, because it's convenient and searchable and there's a search algorithm. And, you know, there's all kinds of reasons to do it.

So I wouldn't be afraid of it. But be aware that there are certain things that you give up when you use other people's platforms and you upload your content to it. This is Angela Langlotz trademark and business law attorney -- copyrights too. And you can find me online at TrademarkDoctor.net. You can also find me on Facebook at Facebook, dot com forward slash TrademarkDoctor. If you like my page, you'll be notified every time I go live, which I do every weekday in order to give you more content and more information about trademarks, copyrights and patents.

I'll see you tomorrow.