YouTube Footy Videos Are Dead

Filed in archive Mistake Of The Week on October 20, 2006

You may have noticed that the majority of YouTube football videos on Soccer-Weblog are now dead. This is because YouTube has been suspending the accounts of users who were making videos freely available.

It's not all footy videos that are no longer accessible, just the good ones. The crappy pixelated highlights reels, edited by teenagers and set to Blink 182 or whatever are still there, but the days when you could search YouTube or come to Soccer-Weblog the day after a game to see the goals are probably over, for now at least.

We should have seen this coming. When YouTube was just an insanely popular non-commercial website they weren't worth suing, but as soon as the Google takeover happened, copyright lawyers began to circle.

There's a decent little blog called 101 Great Goals that diligently posted links (just links, no actual video) to all goals available via YouTube. They recently received threatening legal letters (which you can read here) from a firm representing the Premier League.

The brave little blog didn't back down, but the lawyers have applied pressure to YouTube (or rather, Google) to suspend the accounts of users (like Soccer-Weblog hero Jordan Winter) who were uploading videos, effectively cutting the fun off at its source.

We all understand that the Premier League owns the rights to their "audio/visual content" (as the letter says) but it begs the question: what harm does it do?

No one is going to cancel their subscription to Sky Sports, fox soccer channel or Setanta because they can see low-quality highlights in a tiny window on their laptop. It's not even close to the same thing. And if no one is cancelling their subscription then the TV companies will still be willing to pay the league astronomical sums for the right to show games, and the Premier League isn't going to lose any money.

Further, the YouTube based highlights were a valuable tool in promoting the game in countries like America and Australia, where "soccer" needs all the help it can get.

Seems it's true then, that when the man comes knocking, the party stops rocking. The Google buyout is the death of YouTube as we knew it, and now we have to hope that a similar non-corporate video site will emerge to take its place.

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