For my last post, I went looking for the Orange commercials on YouTube, secretly hoping to find the Verner Troye or the Patrick Schwayze one, since they illustrate the point a bit better. When I saw that I could only find the Darth Vader one, I tried to upload one of the commercials I have here on my hard disk, but I broke off the process when I got this message:
Do not upload any TV shows, music videos, music concerts, or commercials without permission unless they consist entirely of content you created yourself.
Just a few minutes ago, I saw this post on Coolz0r linked to on i-Wisdom which I just referenced (it's a small world after all), complaining about the very same phenomenon I just encountered. At the time of writing there is one comment, which rightly states the reasons for the exclusion, namely the rights of the actors who appear in the commercial.
But while the current legal system proves him right, I don't see any reason for agencies, brand owners and other entities involved in the production and publication of tv and cinema commercials to maintain this system. After all, YouTube, GoogleVideo, Flickr, Zoomr, ... are making life a lot more interesting for us as marketeers, so shouldn't we try to maximise consumer spreading of good creative material, instead of restricting it?
Kind of ties in with the Long Tail for ads idea Russell Davies posted about a while back.
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