The other day, I got an unexpected opportunity. YouTube sent me an e-mail asking if I wanted to start making money from one of my YouTube videos. Apparently, one of them, "Ghost Carves Halloween Pumpkin," had become popular enough on the service for YouTube to take notice. Now I'd be able to reap the fruits of my labor. The pitch was simple enough: I'd need to do just a few things, YouTube would start running ads on my video, and we'd share in the revenues.

I couldn't believe my luck. What I didn't realize, however, is that this offer is also bait for YouTube's copyright police witch hunters.  Before I get to that, let's turn back the clock two years to the day I uploaded this video. "Ghost Carves Halloween Pumpkin" was my first YouTube creation, so I recounted the entire process here. It was an exciting, almost heady, time before HD videos, massive sponsorship programs, and just weeks after Google purchased YouTube.

The video, a stop animation creation, features a bewitched knife carving up a pumpkin. It's actually a pretty crude video since I did it with hundreds of photographs that, on occasion, accidentally featured my hand in the frame. The video is jumpy and over-compressed, and it doesn't even have a sound-track. The latter omission is important, as you'll learn later.

When I posted the video, it generated, perhaps, a few dozen page views. Then, a year after I posted it, YouTube plucked it out of obscurity and featured it in its Halloween videos area. Within hours, the video had amassed tens of thousands of views. It continued generating thousands of page views for weeks afterwards. It currently has about 187,000 views and, to this day, enjoys a kind of annual renaissance as we approach each Halloween. I've since created two sequels, and although each has better production values, neither has achieved the same kind of notoriety.

In the intervening years, I've also watched as Google put its stamp on YouTube, working hard to find ad and marketing opportunities and, of course, introducing the wildly successful Google AdSense program to the video service. YouTube's offer was, essentially, my introduction or should I say "induction" into the AdSense program.

A Friendly Invitation

What YouTube offered me was the opportunity to use Google's contextual ad delivery service on my own video. I know that many small businesses and Web sites use the Google ad program as a low-cost way to generate revenues from their page views. I don't know what level of traffic, or page views, it would take for me to actually make money with AdSense, but I couldn't resist the invitation. That's when things started to get a bit weird.

YouTube's e-mail led me to an online tutorial that would walk me through the sign-up and video submission process. While YouTube's e-mail described the YouTube Partnership Program and making money from my video as "easy," it was actually a bit more involved. You submit your video, and you also submit for entry into the Google AdSense program. Neither process is as easy or harmless as YouTube would like you to believe.

Both processes are submissions; you have to wait for approval. Google collects a decent amount of information for the AdSense program. However, the roughly nine-page Partnership tutorial is where things got dicey. It promised to, among other things, give me guidelines and explain how I can make money. That sounded good. However, the tone of the tutorial took a significant turn by the next screen. It told me to make sure I "own all the rights to the video." That meant I couldn't monetize any photograph, music, movie or TV visuals, artwork, concert, etc. "unless [I] created the contents of the entire video or have permission of the person who created or produced it."

Okay, I've heard that spiel from YouTube before. In fact, when I visited the offices earlier this year, they walked me through some pretty intense and scalable automated solutions for identifying and, potentially scrubbing copyrighted audio and video from YouTube. As one executive explained it to me, "Rights owners sends us references files, we generate an abstraction of that, which is what we call an ID file. A very small representation of that fits in a database. We do the exact same process with every single video that's uploaded to YouTube and in that database we can compare them against each other and find matches." This process not only allows YouTube to remove copyrighted material, but it also gives YouTube the opportunity to see if the original copyright owner wants to monetize the offending video by, perhaps, selling ads against it.

In other words, my own partnership experience was starting to get more serious. I also recognized YouTube's familiar content ownership strategy. The tutorial also admonished me not to include any "bad stuff," like porn, in the video. No worries there. My animated pumpkin may be naked, but it's definitely G-rated.
YouTube dropped the hammer on the next page:

"We are not joking—these rules are really important. If you don't respect these rules your video will be deleted from the site. No exceptions."

Okay, YouTube was playing a little hardball. A violation of the rules would mean swift and serious punishment. I wondered, though, why the tone of the message had changed so drastically from "Hey, make some money with us!" to "Hey get your asses in line!"

But YouTube wasn't done. The next screen reminded me that "It's NOT OK to use someone else's material even if you…" edited it, mashed it up with other works, used only a portion of a song, paid for it, or just sing a copyrighted song. Then YouTube reiterates that all of this is considered copyright infringement and the results is that "your video will be deleted."

I started to feel less and less comfortable about this "partnership" with YouTube. It's like sitting down next to a loveable clown who slowly reveals that's he's packing a Colt 45. I'm still smiling, but no longer making any sudden moves.

The Tutorial then shifts gears again and finally explains how I'll start making money off of my animated pumpkin: YouTube displays ads on my video and we share in the revenue made from ad impressions. Nothing mysterious there. The next page warns me that I'll be asked some information about my video and then reminds me, yet again, that I should not submit content I have not "entirely" created myself.

I started to get over YouTube's semi-hysterical approach to revenue sharing until I got to the last page, which is also the scariest one. YouTube told me the video processing could take time and encouraged patience, adding that one of two things will happen:

"If approved, advertising will appear with the video."

"If rejected, the video will be deleted from YouTube. You will receive an e-mail notification if your video is rejected."

Uh, what?!

Let me get this straight. YouTube invites me to be its partner and then turns around and uses the invitation to see if I'm a copyright infringer. That's what's happening here, isn't it? As I'm sure YouTube sees it, the only reason you'd be rejected from this program is if you ripped off someone else's content. That's a violation of policy, so they zap the video. I guess that automated system isn't working as well as YouTube would like. Now it has resorted to this.

My video, which lacks a sound track, doesn't have any copyrighted material. I made the pumpkin carving. I took the pictures. I edited the video. I said as much in the Q+A portion of the Partnership Program. So my video should be fine. But what if it's not? Are there ever false positives? It doesn't sound like YouTube notifies you that your video features illegal content. There's no chance to fix it and re-upload. Instead, the video would just disappear.

Sorry, but this seems like an awfully sneaky way to rid YouTube of copyrighted content. I mean, it's altogether possible that your "Happy Birthday Gramps" video of your grandfather's teeth falling out when he tries to blow out the candles, which has been viewed 350,000 times, could disappear from YouTube if you join the partnership program.

I'm sure YouTube would argue that, "Hey, it's all there in black and white." And YouTube would be right. That said, this series of "Next" button-driven tutorial pages can go by pretty fast, and I imagine some people might not even realize that their videos are at risk.  So I sit here, waiting and wondering if I'll be approved, or accidentally nabbed in YouTube's copyright witch hunt.