Everyone has surely heard Friday by Rebecca Black by now. Probably dozens of times, whether they wanted to or not. Yet no one can now hear or see it on YouTube. Which is a bit of a mystery.

‘Friday’ No More

The by-now-infamous Friday by Rebecca Black, which came from out of nowhere back in March, has disappeared from YouTube. The reason? “A copyright claim by Rebecca Black.” Why would you get your own video removed due to a copyright violation? No one seems to know.

YouTube has merely issued a perfunctory statement and until whatever mess is responsible for this imposition is cleared up Black fans will have to do without their go-to video to welcome in the weekend.

This takedown comes just a few days after Friday changed from being a free download to a $2.99 rental from ARK Music Factory, the vanity record label responsible for the song and the video which accompanies it.

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YouTube isn’t just the premier destination for videos of mad animals and even madder humans, although there is an abundance of those kinds of clips. It’s also home to movies, television shows, music videos, and games. That’s right, good, old-fashioned interactive entertainment.

Inventive YouTube Videos

There have been lots of inventive YouTube videos over the past few years, most of which have been posted on our sister site WebTVHub. These include Annoying Orange, and virals from Old Spice and Tippex.

And now we have a new game to suck all our time away from us: a YouTube version on the classic Tic Tac Toe. Unfortunately, what is the simplest game when played with pen and paper is a little trickier to recreate on a video site.

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Online video clips can now not only form a part of news articles and spark conversations, they can be the very essence which drives debate. And YouTube’s new ‘As Seen On’ feature is a clever way to keep that dialog going.

Embedding YouTube Videos

As anyone who spends any time browsing the Web, and by virtue of the fact you’re reading this I suspect that includes you, will know, YouTube videos pop up everywhere, with websites embedding them to tell, or merely garnish, a story.

Our sister site WebTVHub is entirely made up of video posts, most of which use YouTube as their source. Embedding YouTube videos is so easy that anyone can do it, and everyone does.

YouTube has now decided to keep track of which videos certain sites and blogs are embedding with a new ‘As Seen On’ feature.

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YouTube is helping beat music piracy by offering a free and legal alternative. The users get the content they desire, while the record labels and artists get paid. Surely that shows the way things need to develop in the future.

YouTube Beats Piracy

Downloads of music over BitTorrent are falling, a trend that must be music to the ears of record label executives. There are obviously still large communities out there sharing music in this way, but the more-casual downloader appears to have found alternatives.

One of those alternatives is YouTube, an online destination where almost every new song, and most old ones as well, are available to listen to free and legally. It may be the officials video released through Vevo, a literal music video, or simply a still of the artist with the audio playing over the top. It doesn’t matter to those seeking to hear a particular track.

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YouTube has introduced multiple Creative Commons options for video uploaders and video remixers. This opens up thousands of clips to be used in videos and allows creators to offer more liberal licensing to other users of the site.

Creative Commons

The Creative Commons licensing system has been around since 2002 and allowed content creators to easily license their works on the Internet. There are six different Creative Commons licenses available, ranging from Attribution Alone to Attribution + Noncommercial + ShareAlike. All of which make various demands of those using the licensed works.

Creative Commons has been used extensively on photographs, with Flickr now hosting almost 200 million images licensed under the system. But video hasn’t really made the most of the Creative Commons licensing system. At least until now.

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YouTube is now officially six-years-old, having launched in beta in May 2005.

That seems like a lifetime ago and, judging by the way the online video site has evolved and grown over that time, it may as well be.

YouTube Is Born

YouTube co-founders Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim, all of whom are now much richer than most of us can even ever dream of being, first registered the YouTube domain in February 2005. Three months later and they launched the site that is now known and used the world over.

It quickly became a hit thanks to how easy it made uploading videos to the Web, a new concept back then. It also, it has to be said, helped that copyrighted clips were rife on YouTube, with full films shown in multiple 10-minute blocks.

It only took 18 months for YouTube to have reached such a level that Google acquired it for a whopping $1.65 billion in October 2006. A sum of money it has been chasing to make back in revenue ever since.

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One man can now tick all three of the claims in the title of this post off his list of things to do before he dies. And all for uploading a video to YouTube. Yes, that really is all it takes these days.

Granted, it took a lot of work to create, but still, what a lucky man.

Greatest Marriage Proposal EVER!!!

That, in case you haven’t worked it out, is the none-too-subtle title of the latest viral video hit, which you can see embedded below.

The couple in question are Matt Still and Ginny Joiner, a couple who no matter how successful their marriage turns out to be (and I wish them all the best) will always have something to remember the proposal by. And what a proposal.

The video shows Ginny at a movie theater when a trailer comes on screen for a film called Making The Movies Jealous. The trailer turns out to be a prelude to Matt entering the theater and proposing to Ginny in front of an assembled throng and family and friends.

This is an organized couple, or at least a couple who act fast in order not to miss an opportunity, as there is a link underneath the video to their website and also to the website of the director of the fake movie trailer. As well as ads there is a link to their Twitter account and a contact form for ‘Media request’.

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