I got a surprise when trying to upload my first video to YouTube last night (which was reported today): YouTube has set a maximum video length of 10 minutes. Their statement says that they found most videos over this amount of time were obviously infringing copyright, and offered a “premium content program” for content owners to upload videos longer than the limit.
When you think about it, this was a smart length of time to choose for a lot of reasons:
- Most TV shows run about 23 minutes without commercials, had they made the maximum 15 minutes a half hour sitcom would have been easy to split.
- Splitting longer material (especially movies) will be nearly unworkable.
- It might also be easier for someone to make a fair-use argument for uploading such a short segment of copyrighted material. Ars pointed out that YouTube has many funny clips from movies like Napoleon Dynamite (and says “a good portion of which are not examples of fair use”)…yet perhaps a short clip with a comment/criticism in the text may pass. We’ll see if YouTube would go along with a challenge.
There is no word yet on whether material longer than 10 minutes is going to be deleted. If so, it will be sad to see a lot of difficult to find material (international or out of print) go away.