That's a rights owner talking about Google's cash cow, YouTube.
Google has made sure that filing complaints against piracy is difficult. So difficult, that many TV companies simply post clips there hoping to get a few pennies per hit. Can "The Tonight Show" have an employee spend all day checking YouTube for pirated clips? Too expensive. Better to have their own channel with "authorized" clips and get more pennies than the opposition.
Pennies. You know, like SPOTIFY notoriously hands out pennies. Meanwhile, GOOGLE nerds are making a fortune.
We know that "artists" are supposed to work cheap. Publishers and gallery owners and TV and film people are well aware that creative people "would work for free." They know about fame-scabs, too. I sure do. Say I want to write a book on slapstick comedy. I'm not going to get a big advance anyway, but a publisher knows that a tenured college professor with plenty of time on his hands between classes, would LOVE to write that book. FREE. So why pay me $5,00 or $10,000 when a fame-scab will do it for no advance at all? He'll take a year or two or five, work at it constantly, and all he wants is his name on a book. (Then he gets my phone number and asks me if I can give him some photos, free, and phone numbers of comedians he'd like to jaw with).
Meanwhile in the GOOGLE world, nobody seems to go in unless they've got a six figure salary. After all, being a cog at the GOOGLE office, blipping with bytes, or blocking rights owners from getting a takedown, IS a skill.
Interns at TV shows don't get paid. Interns at GOOGLE do.
Meanwhile, GOOGLE nickel and dimes the rights owners on YOUTUBE. You can work hard on creating a novelty clip and if you get 50,000 views, maybe you've paid for an hour of your time in creating it. You're just a few days or weeks behind. But you're supposed to be happy with the 50,000 views and the promise that maybe somebody important will hire you, or the clip will "go viral," making even more money...for GOOGLE.
Those salaries? Those GOOGLE salaries?
Ah yes. Drones. Nerds. Drips. But they get front row seats to BROOOOOSE concerts. They may not do anything creative, but they can pay so the teen daughter can have a meet and greet with Justin Bieber. Hell, if they feel like it, they can "write a book" and make it an ePub or mobi download on Amazon, or put a song on iTunes and rightly claim to be an author or a singer/songwriter. This impresses other apple-headed dolts.
Meanwhile the piracy on YouTube piles up because few can afford the takedown procedure, and many others are rightfully afraid of doing it alone and having themselves targeted for not "sharing" with everyone.
Here's a nefarious sidelight. There's always an angle for creeps and hedge-fund types.
There are now businesses that make money sniffing around YouTube and secretly filing what I call "snatches." Let's say they see somebody has digitized an old 45 rpm on the Floogle label. Well, they contact GOOGLE, announce they own the rights to all Floogle productions, and ask that any monetization go to THEM. They either own Floogle productions, pretend they do, or have contacted Floogle productions and asked to split profits on anything they can "snatch."
The justice is that the person who digitized his copy of the song no longer gets the pirated pennies, just the "nice" comments. The lack of justice is that GOOGLE still makes the big bucks and the rights owners, as with Spotify, only get a penny on the dollar.
Meanwhile, back at GOOGLE, the drones and nerds not only get huge salaries for being techie cogs and sprockets, they giggle and smirk over their PERKS.
Freelance writers, actors, crew members...they get no perks. They get lousy pay, usually. It's their choice, of course, but how lop-sided is this getting? Freelancers willing to accept scraping by in exchange for a book or a CD to sell at a gig, and hoping that their savings will make up for no pension, and hoping that their crappy health insurance doesn't mean waiting for an incompetent doctor to kill them...they can't even get more than a few pennies. There's so much FREEEEE on the Internet. There's GOOGLE, much more evil and powerful than any major record label or major publisher ever was or is.
And the rich get richer. One GOOGLE CEO made over $100 million this year.
What's that guy do that's worth that money? Did he write a book that touched millions of lives? A screenplay? A song? Or did he just mince around the sterile office muttering about the latest invasion of privacy scheme to rival GOOGLE maps, or GOOGLE glasses, or the latest court win that insisted the GOOGLE search engine isn't an extortion operation that makes people pay so their product or name gets above "Free Porn Photos."
Does he spend his time lobbying politicians so that DMCA laws remain weak and ineffectual? After all, GOOGLE can't be bothered keeping its bloggers from pirating movies or music, or have YouTube stop being a FREEEEE zone for all the jerks who squeal "copyright is copy wrong."
Right now anyone can get on YouTube or on Blogspot with NO identification, and be a pirate. A rights owner must show credentials, give name, address, phone number and more, and for every violation send a complaint that includes detail, URL number, etc. And then? The complaint gets hoisted to a website (formerly called, heh heh heh, "Chilling Effects") so that any vengeful hacker can see who is "ruining the fun." Stand up for your rights and maybe your website gets knocked off line, or your e-mail is flooded with crank garbage, or your phone is ringing constantly or your snail mail is loaded up with junk. Ha ha.
Meanwhile it's a six figure salary, wonderful health coverage and SNACKS to work for GOOGLE in New York or California. Working for them almost beats being a hedge fund weasel. It's GOOD to be a Google weasel. A Google parasite. A Google maggot. A Google shark. A Google roach. Whatever animal, it sure as hell isn't on the endangered species list, the one that includes "Freelancer."
