True; I should have been more verbose in my previous statement. The other critical part to this issue is that it is arguably used for educational purposes while also being non-damaging to the original copyright holder.
Nonprofits have goals that can be hindered with the theft of intellectual property, but downloading non-commercial code to teach a class (assuming this teaching does not damage the copyright holder) is fair game under fair use.
It is damaging the copyright holder though, the copyright holder can no longer create statistics on the use of the videos and the videos are being shown without credit to the copyright holder.
And so the copyright holders would be able to stand to sue. However, the case that they can no longer create statistics on the usage of videos seems to be weaker than the case that these videos are a valuable educational resource (as I have gathered from the other posts in this thread; attribution also has no place in Fair Use law).
It seems like this would be the easiest, most workable solution.
Unless someone wants to go the extra mile and provide a means of letting teams easily gain access to all the analytics that they want, embedding and a backup database (firstvideoarchive?) for archiving purposes seems the way to go.
Now that I understand the situation a little more, I do agree that regardless of legality, there should be an etiquette established where if you want to use someone else’s match footage:
or
And hopefully we can put together a comprehensive archive that everyone is willing to put their content in it (for the sake of the community).
As they are already publicly available your case of “educational resource” is shaky at best. Allow me to simplify this issue, you’re grasping at straws.
People, calm down. I am giving everyone 24 hours to think. I will reopen thread tomorrow.
Good morning and welcome to another day of FIRST. I have opened this thread hoping that civilized conversation can take place. WE ARE FIRST! What is said here reflects who we are and what we represent please take that into account while posting. I hope that I can check this thread during the day and see positive, respectful posts. We will not all agree on everything but we can still be respectful of each other.
Thanks 
FYI, to those unaware, from the ‘Help Build the Archive!’ thread: http://www.chiefdelphi.com/forums/showpost.php?p=1365843&postcount=35
WatchFIRSTNow has been gracious enough to remove the footage that I wanted to be taken down, and I’m sure if FiM or anyone else wants their videos deleted from WFN’s account, all they have to do is ask. Thank you, WatchFIRSTNow, for complying with our request.
That said, I would recommend the permanent closure of this thread. These posts are full of harsh insults and personal attacks, and I doubt anything positive will come of it in the future other than pointless arguments over ‘facts’ the people can’t agree on.
However, if anyone has **constructive **suggestions for how to improve WFN or archiving in general, I’m sure it would be gladly appreciated, but perhaps just PM those in charge or start a new separate thread for it instead of continuing this black hole.
Thank you to everyone who provided their opinion in the prior posts.
OK folks, nothing to see here, just move along now.
I just love happy endings
I think one incident in a larger situation was addressed and corrected, but there’s still several more to go
As someone who wandered in to this discussion without much prior knowledge, what is the current overall picture, and what are all the other issues?
OK… I tried to avoid commenting on this whole thing, I really did. At this point I need to say something. Many of you go through engineering school, and would be devastated if somebody took everything you worked hard to create and put it under their name. Well, I went to film school, and I can tell you that what is happening when you steal someone’s video (youtube or not, educational or not) you are doing the same thing as someone who would steal an item or idea an engineer created.
As said by Nirvash this is a HUGE issue. I generate viewer statistics on everything I create, then use these when applying for jobs. Users generally poke around a bit on my page if they like something on it, which generates more user interaction with my videos and in turn gets me more exposure.
While I applaud people for donating their footage, and WatchFIRSTNow for removing the footage they basically stole, some people make a living on film and it shouldn’t be assumed that everyone wants their footage included.
The next time you steal a video take a minute to realize that you stole from a human being, you took their work, put your name on it, and went on with your day while they are stuck wondering why they are losing viewership.
-Kelli
So have we forgotten about this issue yet? There’s still tons of un-original content, without citation or a link back, still with ads.
Thread is being closed as per requests.
Sorry to revive this thread however Team 1678 has just realized that our webcast archives were added to WatchFirstNow. The match videos we posted to our YouTube channel from Inland Empire and Sacramento Regionals were reuploaded on the WFN site.
Our students put in significant effort to effort to develop our live streaming system, uploading match videos to YouTube, and adding them to The Blue Alliance. Seeing them added to the WatchFirstNow website without our permission and without attribution is very troubling.
We are concerned with the loss of views and lack of recognition for the content that we put significant effort into creating and sharing with the FIRST community. We would like to our footage removed from the site. Who can we contact to request this?
I found that little paragraph particularly disturbing. You need proof that you don’t own something?
Its really quite simple, you ask before you take. You’re doing more damage to the community then you are doing good.
Our team has the same problem with maintaining our old accounts. Its was a nightmare for me to find the login for our FTP account to our website, let alone our other accounts.
As an author, I see my work pirated online all the time. Even items I have on Amazon for free, even my editing blog (which of course anyone can read)–used without my permission elsewhere.
Even with attribution, taking this work (which is copyrighted by virtue of the fact that I created it under US law) and putting it elsewhere throws off all kinds of metrics from Amazon rankings to blog page views–which hurts my publicity and place in search engine algorithms.
The same is true of a YouTube video; and it doesn’t really matter whether or not any harm was intended, or whether or not you believe it’s significant, or what-have-you.
A general rule of life is to not use other peoples’ work without their permission.
Reese, it’s ironic how close our team numbers are. I sent you a PM detailing my process of contacting WatchFIRSTNow.
I would suggest creating an online Google Doc with the usernames and passwords for your team’s social networking accounts, with viewing/editing access given to trustworthy people. That is how 1676 keeps track of our log-in information for our Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, and and Skype accounts. For example, share the document with both mentors and students that are in leadership, and then when the students graduate, they or the mentors can pass on the document to the next batch of student leaders.
But it’s for educational purposes!!!1
(cue the heavy dripping sarcasm)