June, 2009

YouTube Says, Downloading Your Own Videos is Legal

Based on dozens of incoming posts about “Now Download Your YouTube Videos Legally” for last two days, I’m so confused at the first sight. Since these Flash videos on YouTube are not streaming via Real Time Messaging Protocol like Hulu, we’re always downloading these videos into our browser cache when watching them online. So are these totally illegal? Certainly not. And copyright infringement happens only if the downloaded videos are reused as commerical, I guess.

Then I read carefully about such advancement on YouTube offical announcement. LOL! The simple story is, now you can download your uploaded YouTube videos as MP4 files thru a button “Download MP4″. Holy crap, downloading your own uploaded videos is usually the right thing on earth. Jesus, it’s not legal or not. It’s just a free MPEG-4 video conversion feature provided by YouTube!

Actually, the upside here is MP4 formats are widely accepted by iPod or most video players, so such free conversion is relatively useful. However, those “so-called illegal YouTube downloaders”, such as vixy.net, have better options for downloading our own videos.

Some friends usually asked me about the copyright issues on YouTube videos. I donno. But just watching the videos on YouTube, whatever online streaming or downloading to local disk, is definitely legal as we’re free to see anything unknown. Right?

William Peterson

My Late Review for Acrobat.com - Adobe’s Silly Trick over Online Presentations

For Adobe’s newborn Online Presentations on Acrobat.com Labs, a lot of details could be read thru Digital Inspiration’s first look: “Adobe Introduces Acrobat.com Presentations - Create Impressive Slides Online“. I’m definitely late for this big mashup from Adobe. But when I found out the truth on the experimental product, “oh my god”, it was not what I expect.

No connection to Microsoft PowerPoint slides just makes it a Flash-based slide designer toy. No sounds, no transitions, but Flash Video embedded? It’s immature. All the competitors from Google Docs, Zoho Show to ThinkFree have their right concept for users. I can’t believe that it’s our brother Adobe’s homework…

Last point, this toolkit just let you export slides as PDF? Oh, okay, it’s all about Acrobat. We know that now. More and more brilliant ideas are coming from our great Adobe Labs, but how about any serious evolution later?

Presentation Veteran
William Peterson