I alluded to the fact that YouTube was throwing the baby out with the bathwater in this recent post, but the information I had was coming from unknown commenters on John K's blog, so I decided to do the unthinkable and not take their word as gospel. However, a lot of people who actually work in the industry, such as Amid Amidi, have also echoed those same sentiments, and it seems that, yes, YouTube, in its quest to protect copyright holders, has also been deleting cartoons that entered the public domain many years ago and should be freely distributed to the masses by any means people see fit. I first began to suspect many of those old Warner Bros. shorts were public domain when someone mentioned "Yankee Doodle Daffy" had been taken off the site, a cartoon I bought as a "public domain" video almost a decade ago. Amid has a great post about this over on Cartoon Brew, with links to other great articles on the subject. I think whether or not YouTube should be showing copyrighted material is up for debate, but to also deny fans access to perfectly legitimate classic cartoons is not going to bode well for the site. People are angry, and rightfully so.YouTube removing public domain cartoons
I alluded to the fact that YouTube was throwing the baby out with the bathwater in this recent post, but the information I had was coming from unknown commenters on John K's blog, so I decided to do the unthinkable and not take their word as gospel. However, a lot of people who actually work in the industry, such as Amid Amidi, have also echoed those same sentiments, and it seems that, yes, YouTube, in its quest to protect copyright holders, has also been deleting cartoons that entered the public domain many years ago and should be freely distributed to the masses by any means people see fit. I first began to suspect many of those old Warner Bros. shorts were public domain when someone mentioned "Yankee Doodle Daffy" had been taken off the site, a cartoon I bought as a "public domain" video almost a decade ago. Amid has a great post about this over on Cartoon Brew, with links to other great articles on the subject. I think whether or not YouTube should be showing copyrighted material is up for debate, but to also deny fans access to perfectly legitimate classic cartoons is not going to bode well for the site. People are angry, and rightfully so.
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
7-08-2006 @ 10:46AM
dirwuf said...
My guess is that YouTube is not purposely deleting PD cartoons...they just don't want to deal with figuring out what is PD and what isn't, and are removing anything that even appears to be copyrighted.
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7-08-2006 @ 10:53AM
Sasquatch said...
Who gives a damn if they delete them? They are freakin' cartoons. Go outside and live and forget about cartoons you dork.
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7-08-2006 @ 2:45PM
Mariah Abell said...
Where else are you going to find Looney Tunes because NO ONE airs it on TV anymore?! All the networks play is their stupid originals who have no respect for the cartoons who have proceeded them?!
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7-08-2006 @ 4:49PM
dirwuf said...
Actually, to be fair, Warner Brothers DOES have 30 classic tunes up on their website:
http://looneytunes.warnerbros.com/web/toons/toons.jsp
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7-08-2006 @ 7:25PM
Gavin said...
Public domain cartoons are still to be found on Google Vids.
I post some on my site from time to time...wink, wink, nudge, nudge.
But yeah, I have started using YouTube for some vids, and I find that stuff gets taken down way too often.
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7-14-2006 @ 12:04AM
Pete said...
Attempted to view a bunch of Felix the Cat videos on YouTube, clearly public domain stuff form the early 20's. But all the links return a "removed due to copyright infringement" error. Disappointing that YouTube can't make the effort to identify legit content...
http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=4AA573E3245A81C5
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