Copyright Infringement Handled with Class
As some of you may have noticed, we removed the videos comparing the quality of the Brightcove player to the quality of the YouTube player.
Unfortunately for us, we had used a clip from Sunday night’s baseball game between the Red Sox and Yankees. And, no, we didn’t have permission to use it. We received an email from Brightcove asking that we remove the clip, and of course we complied immediately.
What is most notable, however, was the actual language in the letter. Unlike the intimidating and ominous tactics reportedly used by the RIAA, Brightcove was remarkably kind in their tone, appreciative of our respect for their quality, and unthreatening in their request. So much so, in fact, that I asked them if we could reprint their notice to us. Their reply was again appreciative that we had asked. Thanks to the good folks at Brightcove for their handling of the situation. And with that, here it is:
Hello,
We certainly appreciate your thoughts and positive comments regarding the quality of Brightcove players and videos, as you described in your recent post on Online Video Watch. We agree that Brightcove delivers the best quality for uploading, encoding and delivering video on the Web ;).
Brightcove also offers content owners full management and discretion of how they want to distribute the videos they own. We respect the rights and intellectual property of content owners. Our Terms of Service clearly documents the rights of these owners, as well as the acceptable use policy of anyone uploading content into our service.
That said, the content currently uploaded and displayed in your video players may require additional authorization for distribution. All publishers must own the necessary rights to the content or acquire appropriate distribution and display rights from the authorized copyright owner. Please refer to the Brightcove Terms and Conditions and Brightcove Acceptable Use Policy, that you agreed to upon registration:
http://corp.brightcove.com/publishertermsandconditions.cfmIf you have acquired additional rights to upload this ESPN clip into your account and player, please provide us with a copy of any appropriate rights and permissions that you received from the copyright holder for these videos.
We hope to hear back from you within the next few days, so that we may resolve this issue timely and in the best interests of both you and the content holder.
Again, we greatly appreciate your enthusiasm and interest in Brightcove, as well as your positive feedback regarding the quality in our players. We hope you understand and appreciate our questions regarding distribution permissions.
Thank you in advance for your time and consideration, and please let us know if you have any additional questions.
Go Sox!
Regards,
XXXXXXXXXX
Brightcove.comcc: Brightcove Legal Department
Go Sox, indeed.
April 26th, 2007 at 1:19 pm
another reason to love brightcove - where ironically I am not published… had a difficult time uploading via my mac four months ago, and never got around to going back… thanks for the reminder!
April 26th, 2007 at 4:20 pm
That is interesting. I’m going to have to follow up on this.
I’m sorry that you had the video removed, especially considering there might be fair use debates to be found, they did handle it with a lot of class. I have a lot of respect for that in a host.
They deserve the kudos!
April 29th, 2007 at 12:09 pm
[...] found an interesting story about Brightcove on a new blog I read, Online Video Watch. The blogger put a Brightcove video on his site to compare [...]