Search results from data api full of pirated music videos?

Question

Hi,

I'm using the YouTube data API. It's worrisome that a lot of the content my users are searching for is likely pirated material - in other words, music videos that probably don't have the artist's permission to be on YouTube.

I see YouTube has a 'YouTube music' URL, which looks to be approved by artists participating. I'm not sure if these results are taking precedence over others, or if they're even allowed to show up in third party search results. For example, if I search for:

Bad Romance - Lady Gaga

will the 'official' music video appear in the results? How can we tell?

I'm thinking to shut off my service as a result of not being able to control this, I want to play fair,

Thanks

Answer 1

To make this a programming question, I'm going to assume you mean "can I programatically determine Google's opinion of their agreement with the copyright holder?", I think the answer is no. See for example: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kffacxfA7G4 - no music url or other indicator (that I can see), but I'd guess at 270m views it must have attracted sufficent attention for the copyright agreement status to be resolved.

So far as the rest of your question goes:

• "How can I tell if the owner of the artist has an agreement with Google which covers a specific video" - this is something to be answered by a court, not a programming question. -

• The ethical question raised by co-operation with Google as a potential infringer of copyright is not a programming question either.