Teach42

I’ve seen a couple people post about Vidpedia recently and even had somebody email me about it. I saw it a few days ago and dismissed it because there really wasn’t much video content on it at all, but I decided to give it a second look.

Now I can’t get that nasty taste of bile out of my mouth.

Where to begin? Let’s start with the basic content. Where exactly are the videos coming from? First I watched a video about cars and lightning. Then I found the exact same video on YouTube. I hope BBCWorldwide doesn’t mind that their video was re-published without giving them any credit whatsoever. So then I checked out another video, this time about Mars, and discovered the same thing. Hope Neal Adams doesn’t mind. I checked four different videos and they all seemed as though they were lifted from YouTube.

But surely if this is a collaborative project, some of them must be from legitimate sources, right? Yeah, not so much. Seems there’s a user named WootUp who has uploaded every video that I’ve been able to find so far. He’s a one man wrecking crew.

So here’s how Vidpedia gets its content. 1) Surf YouTube and find video. 2) Download video and repost it. 3) Ignore all metadata, including source, description and author’s credits. No joke, WootUp didn’t even take the time to steal the descriptions along with the video.

Supposedly it’s a ‘repository of videos that anyone can edit’. But you can’t even edit the videos, you can just edit the description, category and tags. Not only that, but they give away a handy dandy download link. So far as I know, videos posted on YouTube are there for people to stream, not download. Yes, I know people have found a way around that, but that doesn’t mean that they do it with the author’s permission. Vidpedia is providing a lovely shortcut to getting straight to the video theft.

*sighs* What kind of world are we living in when YouTube is the innocent site that other sites are now preying on?

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