Forgive Me Father, For I Have Infringed...

Ok, so about two months ago I was able to attend the University of Florida football team's season opener against Southern Mississippi. For the most part is was a pretty standard UF game. College kids drinking, fans doing the "Gator Chomp", and lots of loud noise. At one point however, everything went up a few notches as freshman QB extraordinaire, Tim Tebow, made his highly anticipated debut. At this point I pulled out the camera phone and started recording. I ended up with four small clips(around 30 seconds each), but unfortunately time had run out before Tebow got to run his first play and he ended up scoring his first UF TD in the other end zone.

After a night of celebrating, I totally forgot about the camera phone vids. A few days later however, I remembered I had them and decided to upload them to YouTube so I could share them with my friends who weren't able to partake in the drinking, football watching and more drinking.

Now, for those of you unfamiliar with YouTube(well then you're probably not technically advanced enough to even get to this blog but...) it's sort of like the MySpace of the video world. I'm sure you're familiar with MySpace. You know, attention whores, real whores, emo kids looking all sad, etc. Anyway, I put the clips up on YouTube, e-mailed the link to some friends and forgot all about it. That was until I received an e-mail the other day stating that I had violated a copyright law.

-READ MORE ABOUT MY INFRINGING BEHAVIOR-
Apparently, a company by the name of Collegiate Images, LLC claimed that the material was infringing upon their copyright and asked that it be removed. Intrigued, I checked out the Collegiate Images website. It appears that they provide still images and video of college sports to their customers. In fact, here's what they state:

"Collegiate Images exclusive representation of copyright and trademark footage and still images, for major universities, conferences, bowl games and network rightsholders, enables our customers to access fresh, compelling, and unique imagery."

I understand that they're making money by selling videos of collegiate sports. That's cool with me. Though, I wonder how much goes back into the university system to help out the student athletes they're pimping. However, do they really consider four crappy(let's be honest a cell phone cam isn't the greatest A/V device) cell phone vids to be infringing upon their content? Why in the hell do they want to pick on me?

It appears that if I want to fight them on this that I have to write a letter to YouTube explaining why there was no copyright infringement, and why I should be allowed to host it on their site. Though, it also states that I could be held liable if I "knowingly materially misrepresent that material or activity was removed or disabled by mistake or misidentification". Somehow I think that Collegiate Images and YouTube have a lot more money than I do, and could squash me in court if it ever made it that far.

Instead, I decided to do what any other great American would. Write a blog about it that contains my response! Here goes:

Dear YouTube and Collegiate Images, LLC,
It's come to my attention that four camera phone videos I took while in attendance at the Florida/Southern Miss game this past August might be in violation of some sort of copyright law. Personally, I'm not sure how they violate any copyright as they were pretty crappy quality, I wasn't selling them and I actually attended UF. I'm sure that the horrible resale I got on my textbooks over the course of my studies entitles me to some benefits, no matter how small. With that said, I've decided not to fight you in a court of law, but rather bring this issue out to the court of public opinion. Hopefully, others will read this post, and realize what horrible corporate jackholes you are and will hate Collegiate Images, LLC forever and ever.

Have a Nice Day!
-BDoc