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TechCrunch reported this morning that YouTube has added two new video-blocking features to their arsenal for sponsoring partners.

Youtube's new blocking features

The first is a button that allows to easy blocking of duplicate content. By selecting it, partners can automatically block other users from uploading another version of the same content. The second is a geo-blocking tool that effectively allows partners to choose where each video can and can’t be seen based on geopolitical borders (or, more importantly, geographic markets).

While I understand that the move is meant to appease anxious copyright holders, the whole thing still leaves a bad taste in my mouth. These new features might make who has access to content and the context of viewing much easier to control, but doesn’t address the question of what the control is good for in the first place.

The entire point of posting content on YouTube is to get it viewed, linked to, circulated. To generate buzz, conversation, to insert it into popular cultural discourse and make it spreadable. And, simply put, things can’t become spreadable if you don’t let people spread it.

In the paper If it Doesn’t Spread, it’s Dead which I co-wrote with Henry Jenkins and my C3 colleagues Ana Domb and Joshua Green, we explained that content doesn’t spread itself like a virus. Rather, people pass it to one another to communicate things, and in doing so, often have to replicate, repurpose, and reframe the content. However,

Such repurposing doesn’t necessarily blunt or distort the goals of the original communicator. Rather, it may allow the message to reach new constituencies where it would otherwise have gone unheard. C3 affiliated researcher Grant McCracken (2005) points towards such a model when he suggests that the word consumer should be replaced by a new term, multiplier, to reflect the fact consumers expand the potential meanings that get attached to a brand by inserting it into a range of unpredicted contexts of use.

By blocking duplicate versions, content creators are in fact potentially subverting their own interests, blocking out the potential for new markets and constituencies and hindering enthusiastic content promoters that could help broaden their audience.

Moreover, as I found in my research on the rich online circulation community around East Asian TV dramas, with the sheer scope and volume of content available online, even in a niche subject, sites of third-party aggregation and curation are crucial nodes in the circulation process. With the amount of content available, consumers need these site to help filter and organize content according to their interests, and copyright holders can’t always anticipate what the affinity categories might be. By not allowing people to duplicate and curate content, they’re crippling a key activity that helps promote their content.

And finally, nothing makes less sense than geo-blocking. Timed releases into international markets is an invitation for rich unauthorized markets to rise. The transnational flow of media is more and more in hands of audiences. People are coming together to select, reproduce, and distribute the not only collective, but radically collaborative imaginaries that they inhabit. And it’s changing the way media control works, and no one-click feature is going to stop that.

Recently, Viacom, in the process of of trying to “protect” their intellectual property not only managed to make copyright claims on original transformative work that is protected under fair use, they managed to censor political protest against racism in the process.

(one of the revised shirt designs available at racebending.com)

In one of their “routine sweeps,” they issued a take-down to on-demand retail platform zazzle.com for the contents of the racebending.com store, a non-profit effort that sold t-shirts to protest the all-white casting of non-white leads in the Avatar: the Last Airbender live-action film (more details on that particular controversy here and here). Racebending.com sold shirts with original art and designs, sporting slogans such as “Aang ain’t white” and “this is not a tan” (in response to a statement by one of the cast members about tanning to get into character), and “The Last Airbender: putting the Cauc back in Asian.”

None of the products on the site contained any images from the series (see them here, posted by the creator) — the only thing “in violation of Viacom’s intellectual property rights” were words used to talk about something that Viacom produces. Viacom, it seems, sees itself as owning your discussions around its properties.
We are, by now, long accustomed to epic failure on the part of DMCA takedowns initiated by major media conglomerates. Viacom, in particular, has been a visible and often hilariously illogical offender, with its memorable removal of a clip Christopher Knight put up on youtube from the show WebJunk 2.0, which had featured none other than Knight’s own campaign commercial (presumably aired without permission).

But there are two unsettling things that this instance in particular highlights. The first is a rising trend in companies deciding to “participate” and “acknowledge” and with fans and users by effectively claiming ownership over their discussions and discourse. This is, for instance, what I pointed out with Skittles use (and consequent barring of access to) the twitter feed on their front page. It is a problem of companies claiming to want conversation, but attempting only to enact control.

Related to this is then the second pattern, which is that these supposedly objective methods at issuing take-down, general search-term sweeps that don’t differentiate and make value judgements, are in fact anything but neutral. They presumes the right of large corporations — which are, lest we forget, are already part of a structure of unequal power relations — while simultaneously allowing them disavow responsibility by blaming it on the technological limitations. That is to say, Viacom, in this instance, will no doubt claim innocence to censorship by virtue of it having been “unintentional,” convieniently overlooking the fact that they have structured their use of technology in a way that makes precisely these types of “unintentional” abuses possible, and increasingly prevalent.

All of this, finally, is made all the more poignant by the fact that this case centers around a question of race. In other words, the very voices Viacom tried to silence this time around  — whatever their intent — we those being raised in protest of already being silenced. Viacom is effectively making a statement that groups already struggling for representation in mainstream mass media similarly don’t even have the right to represent themselves elsewhere.