If you post on You Tube, read this first

With terms like these I won't be posting much at You-Tube any longer, rather I'll host it here.

Get this:

In its Terms & Conditions, the wildly popular video sharing site YouTube emphasizes that "you retain all of your ownership rights in your User Submissions".

There's quite a large "BUT...", however. Not only does YouTube retain the right to create derivative works, but so do the users, and so too, does YouTube's successor company. Since YouTube has all the hallmarks of a very shortlived business - it's burned through $11.5m of venture investment (Sequoia Capital is the fall guy here) and has no revenue channels - this is more pertinent than may appear.

But I can remove my videos and then they don't have a right to them, yes? Er, not really. . .

The license that you grant YouTube is worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free, sublicenseable and transferable. The simplest way to terminate it is by withdrawing your video. But even this is problematic, as OpenTV's Nathan Freitas wrote recently:

"It is good to know that if you delete a video from YouTube, then the rights you have granted them terminate. However, once they have distributed your video 'in any media format and through any media channel', that's a little hard to take back, right?"

I'm not opposed to people sharing my videos, passing them along to friends without my knowledge. Same with my blog writings: take all you want. But using it to make money off of and not remunerating me, at all? Horse-doodie.

So, here is my take: if I am posting political stuff, like this, then hey, You-Tube can have at it. But my China videos? They're to be deleted. And soon.