Why are songs and movies copyrighted but you can upload a full playthrough of a video game on YouTube?
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A couple things:
1.) There’s a good argument that playthroughs of video games (which largely have commentary) fall under fair use due to it being transformative in nature. You’re not just seeing the game, a part of what you’re experiencing is their reactions to the game. Movies or music being posted aren’t transformative in the same way
2.) It’s generally believed that video game playthroughs don’t harm sales and even potentially help as functional free marketing, there’s probably a lot of data supporting this that wouldn’t be public information, I doubt they’re just guessing with this. This is largely because a lot of games have choices, things one can miss, multiple ways of doing things and a lot of the appeal for many people with games is the challenge of doing it and discovering stuff yourself, all this stuff isn’t provided in watching a play though. Contrast this to movies and music where you would just get the whole experience seeing it on YouTube. Yes there might be diminished quality but this isn’t a massive factor for a lot of people and would absolutely cut into sales, and the free marketing angle doesn’t really make sense, since would people really watch a movie on YouTube then go buy it on DVD or whatever? Maybe some, but a lot won’t. Again, there’s likely actual data backing up this assumption that’s not publicly available
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