MyHeavy is a Splog

Someone's going to get a bunch of justifiably angry emails from the Videoblogging Group tonight.
Imagine if a website launched...and they simply reposted blog posts from Boing Boing, Scobleizer, Engadget, etc. These kind of sites are called "splogs". Any funded site knows this is a no no.

But new video hosting companies are still all learning that you can't build a site by stealing other people's video either...which is exactly what MyHeavy.com has done.

• They seem to be pulling videos from different feeds like Blip and Google.
• They repost them to their site with a preroll video ad...and an image ad all around the video.
• They put a MyHeavy watermark on the video.
• They resize the video from the original intended size.
• They have no linkback to the original blog or blog post.

See how my video plays in their page.

So here they have grabbed my video of Ryanne and I buying our engagement ring.
Now I got ads all over it. Great. This personal moment from my life has now become my worst nightmare (see video) thanks to MyHeavy....without my permission.

We've seen this kind of behavior before from a video hosting site: Veoh about 8 months ago.
The group at WeAreTheMedia did a great blog post detailing that situation:

A visitor comes to Veoh, finds a video blog, and falls under the mistaken impression that the creator of the blog originally uploaded the video to Veoh. Clearly, Veoh must be a good service if it’s getting content that’s this good. Veoh profits monetarily from increased visibility caused by an unnatural wealth of content.

Sites like Blip.tv and others should be even more angry since our videos are being taken from these RSS feeds. Blip.tv spends time and energy building up good relationships with creators so people feel comfortable using them as their hosting site. Then a new company like MyHeavy comes along and grabs all this content without any effort.

MyHeavy just got funded for 12.5 million dollars from Polaris Venture Partners and Jacobson Investments.  They probably felt like needed to make a big splash and start showing they have a whole lot of content RIGHT NOW. Why spend time earning people's trust....just grab it. Who cares? We'll see how they react tomorrow when they read the irate emails from videobloggers whose content they grabbed. Veoh ended up apologizing and immediately removing all the videos they scraped.

WeAreTheMedia has a good list of best practices for video hosting companies.

• Always keep video files in their original format to preserve the creator’s intended viewer experience. Only transcode or “down-res” a video file with the creator’s permission.
• Always link the “collection” of content (generally a videoblog) back to its creator. If a video comes from Josh Leo’s blog there should be a prominent link to Josh Leo’s blog on every page including content from or mentioning the collection.
• Always serve aggregated video files from their original hosts so that the original hosting service can track statistics and serve ads if the user chooses to do so.
• Always link from the video playback page to the page the video was originally published on. This is often called the “permalink”. So If Josh originally posted his video to http://joshleo.com/my-video/ the video view page in the aggregator must link to that URL with an indication that the video itself and more information about the video can be found there.

Comments

[Peter]

Great post, great example and exactly right.

First, these companies should talk to their laywers. CC licenses mean that often attribution is required, and they better put some clear attribution (links back) on their pages. Any laywer will tell them that.

Second, adding their own pre-roll ads and watermark is surely illegal, although I'm not a laywer.

Third, should the videoblogging group hire a laywer?

Fourth, being moral assholes won't get you a popular social webservice.

[dude dude]

Dude get a lawyer. This is blatant copyright infringement with intent to profit. Get a smart lawyer and they'll settle for thousands.

[B]

I've got a splog grabbing my shit left and right - any tips on making them stop?