Go to the video-sharing site YouTube, type in a search for “I’m Too Sexy,” and after a little digging you’ll find a grainy copy of Right Said Fred’s original 1991 music video, taped by somebody off MTV2. You’ll also find dozens of homemade videos for the song, variously assembled by fans from footage of Mortal Kombat, the Beatles, The Dark Crystal, My Little Pony, and especially themselves: a shirtless guy wearing a mask and jumping around his bedroom, a young woman wearing an eye patch whose dance partner rocks sunglasses and a sombrero, two teenage girls pretending a blanket on the floor of their parents’ kitchen is a catwalk, and many more.
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Unsurprisingly, music videos of one kind or another are among the most popular features on both YouTube and its chief competitor, Google Video: nobody wants to watch a tiny low-res movie for 30 or 90 minutes, but 4 minutes is just about right if it’s amusing enough. What’s a little more surprising is that there are so many fans’ own videos for popular or not-so-popular recordings. The upload-your-own-video sites–and MySpace, which is getting its own video service off the ground–have figured out that a lot of people don’t just want to listen and watch: they want to be a part of the music they love. And letting them be involved sometimes means looking the other way about a little bit of copyright infringement–which both the sites and organizations like the RIAA seem to be doing in many cases, for a change.
Likewise, besides fan-made material, YouTube (and to a lesser extent Google Video) hosts scores of bootleg live videos, promotional clips, and archived TV appearances–as well as actual music videos–by artists who probably aren’t paying attention. (If you want to watch, say, the English folk-rock band Fotheringay playing Bob Dylan’s “Too Much of Nothing” on a German TV show in 1970, you’re in luck.) Few copyright holders seem to be complaining loudly so far in cases like these, and according to Motion Picture Association of America spokesperson Kori Bernards, the major video sites have been “good corporate citizens so far, and have complied with our company’s requests to take down certain materials. . . . As long as they continue to abide by the law, we don’t have a problem with them.”
