the snowman's travails (more)

["James J. O'Donnell" <jod@georgetown.edu>]

A further exchange David Rosenthal and I had on his blog 
overnight . . .

David Rosenthal said:

     I should have used Google earlier. It turns out that a team 
at the University of North Carolina is in fact selecting and 
collecting YouTube video of the 2008 Presidential campaign. They 
describe their system in this paper (PDF).

     However, their focus is on the process of identifying and 
selecting suitable videos. Their paper ignores the issues of 
preservation.

     The paper also fails to make the economic case for expending 
resources on collecting and preserving video that there is no 
convincing reason to believe won't be available from YouTube 
indefinitely. To steal Jim's words from the comment above, they 
don't think the snowman is lucky. I should stress that I believe 
the case can be made, but it is not a slam dunk and it does not 
depend on knowing whether Google will continue to make the video 
available. Maybe you trust a single archive to control history. 
Or maybe you are worried about future Winston Smiths, whether 
corporate or governmental.

     October 15, 2007 10:49 PM

____________________________________________

Jim O'Donnell said...

     And meanwhile, Google themselves just made the rights 
management issue harder. If you got those snowman clips from CNN 
or another provider that claims copyright, well . . .:

*****

     Google Takes Step on Video Copyrights
     By MIGUEL HELFT
     Published: October 16, 2007, New York Times

     "SAN BRUNO, Calif., Oct. 15 - Google is seeking to put an end 
to the copyright wars over online video.

     "On Monday, the company unveiled a long-anticipated system 
that, if effective, would allow media companies to prevent their 
clips from being uploaded to YouTube without permission.

     "Whether the system will work well enough to satisfy media 
companies who have been irked by the proliferation of 
unauthorized copyrighted clips on YouTube is not yet clear. But 
if successful, the system, which Google is offering to all media 
companies, could usher in a detente between them and Google."

     Jim O'Donnell