Post#4 » Tue Jan 21, 2014 9:41 pm
It's Google your talking about, and they know their time as a power house internet advertising firm is coming to an end. That is why they've made all of these sudden buyouts of physical technology companies and engineering firms, as other internet service companies slowly squeeze them into irrelevancy. Advertising through YouTube is what generates the bulk of their income at present, but the state of operations hinges dangerously upon the Trans-Pacific Copyright Treaty never passing. If it were to pass you could kiss at least a quarter of the videos on YouTube goodbye overnight, with assurance that a follow-up sweep of non-original copyright infringing content would likely soon follow.
AOL Set the trend for this sort of shift from what you know into something entirely different when they foresaw the end of the dial-up era on the horizon. They wisely invested their entire networth into buying out Time-Warner before their dial-up internet service division completely collapsed. Google is now positioning itself to perform a very similar manuever by going from internet marketing into the fields of military weapons contractor and ISP. Pretty crazy shift.
And now, I don't like how we've been effectively forced into having Google+ accounts. By accepting the terms of Google+ we've locked ourselves into a three-strike violation policy. Meaning if you receive a strike for a policy violation on any of the Google websites/services it's a "global" strike against your account. Once you have accumulated three strikes against your account your account is terminated by Google. Meaning your Gmail, YouTube, whatever, it's all gone. A fact I'm finely attuned to having known someone it happened to and now also having a strike againt my account over the most trivial non-issue on YouTube.
Seriously, if you upload a video to YouTube and they auto-block the video for a "detected copyright violation", DO NOT CONTEST IT! Just quietly delete the video and move on with your life. Doesn't matter if a dozen other people already have the same content up on their channels, doesn't matter if your peaceable in what you say when politely contesting the violation, because no one is going to read your contesting statement! Google will simply auto-slap a strike against your account for daring to contest the auto-block. Is it just? No. Is it fair? Absolutely not. The message they're sending out to all YouTube Channel operators by doing this is effectively:
If you uploaded copyrighted material before a certain date then you can keep it on your channel and we really don't care, but if anyone else tries to upload the same content now they will be punished.
Totally illogical, but same could be said for a lot of the things Google has done over the years.