The news comes amid talk of a brewing war between Twitter, which owns Vine, and Facebook’s Instagram, which just launched a short video service of its own.

Since launching in January, Vine videos have found a niche with consumers who enjoy sharing videos with their friends, but they’ve also found a place at arts forums like the Tribeca Film Festival (see the Bambi clip below), and have attracted copyright controversy.

The Unruly survey says that Vine now has more than 13 million users, and that the service is popular with advertisers since branded Vines are four times more likely to be shared than video ads.

Despite the hype, not everyone is enamored with the idea of sharing short video on social media. My colleague, Mathew Ingram, for instance, likes Instagram but says he will never take up the video service — in part because it’s difficult to browse on the go.

Finally, Bambi fans, as promised: Here’s Gillian Jacob’s “Origin Story“:

If you haven’t tried it, Vine is a tool to make looping, six-second video clips and post them on social media or a website. The company, which is owned by Twitter, launched in January and its videos have already become a part of the Tribeca Film Festival, the U.S. Senate and major marketing campaigns.

A new video mash-up culture

Vine exists because of new smartphone technology but it also replicates older forms of mashup culture. In particular, it mirrors what pioneering hip-hop artists started to do in the 1980s — taking sounds from myriad sources and sharing them through records like Paul’s Boutique and Ready to Die.

Those hiphop records are aural tapestries that today stand as monuments to a new form of music and community. In the 2000s, however, copyright collectors came along and sued the rappers — resulting in a drawn-out debate over where to draw a line between culture and intellectual property theft. Hip-hop  largely prevailed but was damaged in the process.

Now, a fight over a Vine video last month suggests history may repeat itself but this time, on the video front. The dispute involved the musician Prince using a law called the DMCA to force Vine to take down six-second concert clips posted by a fan. The fan didn’t oppose Prince’s takedown demand, meaning no one has ruled on whether a six-second clip actually infringes copyright. But if a court did look at the Vine case, the decision process would lead right through hip-hop.

Hip hop, copyright and six second samples

In the 1990s, hip-hop artists called the sounds they use “samples.” Copyright owners, however, called it theft instead and sued the musicians. The conflicts led to important court decisions about music, but whose principles apply equally to Vine.

As the Disco Project explained in a thoughtful analysis of the Prince case, the most relevant precedents involve the Notorious B.I.G. and the Beastie Boys. Both were involved in famous cases involving short samples.

In the case of the Notorious B.I.G., a Tennessee court shut down store sales and radio plays of the late rapper’s “Ready to Die” album, and a jury awarded $4 million in damages — all over a three note horn riff. An appeals court, which had earlier written “get a license or do not sample,” upheld the verdict in 2007.

As law professor Tim Wu explained at the time, the case and others like it were especially absurd because the copyright owner was not even a musician but a one-man corporation who had obtained the music rights under shady circumstances.

Fortunately, in the case of the Beastie Boys, a California appeals court took a more rational approach to the issue and ruled that a six second (the same length as a Vine video!) flute sample on the song “Pass the Mic” didn’t infringe on copyright. The Supreme Court, in 2005, refused to reconsider the decision.

The upshot, however, is that today we still don’t know for sure how long a sample can be before it infringes copyright. Twitter declined to comment on whether it believes Vine videos are covered by copyright law’s “fair use” exception, but a source familiar with the company told me that the decision to make the videos six seconds long was not a coincidence.

Chilling our new visual culture

The trouble with Prince’s request to take down the Vine videos is not so much the disappearance of the videos themselves — but instead that Vine and other forms of visual expression could meet the same fate as early hip-hop.

When the Beastie Boys released their sample-stuffed 1989 masterpiece, Paul’s Boutique, the law was still in a gray area and no one was suing hip-hop artists. That’s no longer the case. As copyright scholars have explained, the threat of lawsuits and the astronomic cost of clearing samples means, today, no one could make an album like Paul’s Boutique in the first place.

And that’s the danger posed by Prince. Right now, we’re enjoying a rich new age of images — everything from Vine videos to BuzzFeed cat GIFs that are shared, recast and then shared again. If lawyers began to throw copyright grenades into this mix, these splendid strains of creativity could be quickly snuffed out.

Does this mean that all Vine videos should be fair use? It’s hard to say. People are already using the platform to produce clever and original works of art — the sort of thing copyright law is meant to reward. Likewise, big companies who use Vine for marketing have a case for using intellectual property law to protect their brands. It seems inevitable that these issues will get resolved sooner than later.

The biggest task for now, though, is to find a way to do so without resorting to the harsher tools of copyright law, including the $150,000 damage demands that are a common feature of cease and desist letters. Congress is right now reviewing the Copyright Act. The process presents a perfect way to protect and foster this emerging age of visual culture — rather than try to smother it like hip-hop. But let’s give the last word to the rappers (click on the Vine vid below):

  (Image by R. Gino Santa Maria via Shutterstock)

We wrote about Twitter’s collaboration with a startup called Snappy TV and Turner Broadcasting that allowed the NCAA to tweet out highlight clips from March Madness throughout the annual college basketball tournament, with the clips sponsored by AT&T and Coke Zero, and a Twitter spokesperson confirmed Monday that the ESPN clips will appear in a similar manner inside Twitter Cards. The report indicated that Twitter will be selling advertising specifically around the sports clips that are tweeted out.

The company announced major updates to its Cards technology in early April that allowed for more types of content to appear in the tweets and more app promotion for third-party apps cross-posting to Twitter. The key to Cards is that a user never has to leave Twitter to view the content the Cards contain — everything is viewable directly in stream, which encourages users to stay on Twitter’s website.

My colleague Mathew Ingram and I have written about Twitter’s transformation over the past year or so to become more of a media company, and Twitter’s partnerships with television, music and video outlets are numerous. There were rumors of deals with Viacom and NBC, a partnership with Nielson to measure user activity around television, the launch of the Twitter #music app and following music entertainment show.

For Twitter, all of this content could make tweets more engaging for users who become captive audience members participating in live events. But perhaps more importantly for the company, if it’s gearing up for the IPO everyone expects, video provides an excellent platform for advertising and big brand partnerships that could make Twitter a lot of money.

These deals reinforce something I tried to make clear in an earlier post about the company’s plans: namely, if you don’t like television then you’re probably not going to be very happy with the future of Twitter. The deal with BBC America — which is owned by BBC Worldwide, the commercial arm of the agency, and carries such popular shows as Doctor Who and Top Gear in the U.S. — will presumably see Twitter run clips from those shows inside its users’ streams, in much the same way it did with ESPN during March Madness.

.@Twitter and @BBCAmerica, home of #DoctorWho & #TopGear, ink deal to offer 1st in-Tweet branded video synced to entertainment TV series—
BBC AMERICA (@BBCAMERICA) April 18, 2013

TV shows inside your Twitter stream

There have been other such one-off deals — as well as arrangements like the one with the Weather Channel, which will bring weather clips into Twitter’s expanded tweets — but the BBC America partnership seems to be the first one that involves an entire channel and potentially all of their shows, and it could easily be the prototype for further such deals. But will users react positively or negatively to all of this real-time video showing up in their Twitter streams?

Meanwhile, Twitter is also launching a somewhat different project with the Comedy Central channel that illustrates just how much the company wants to bring video as an experience inside the stream: the network is launching what it calls a five-day “comedy festival,” but all of the content will appear within Twitter, and most of it will be either created or distributed via Twitter’s recent video acquisition, Vine — which is designed for video clips of six seconds or less.

According to a report in the New York Times about the arrangement, a number of comedians — including legends like Mel Brooks and Carl Reiner — will be posting video snippets of comedy routines as well as jokes using the hashtag #ComedyFest. On Tuesday, comedian Steve Agee will reportedly host a “Vine Dining” party as part of the festival, in which he and others will tell stories in six-second video clips that will be hosted and distributed by the Twitter network.

Video plus brands equals ad dollars

As my colleague Eliza Kern noted in her post last week about the rumors of deals with Viacom and NBC, these moves are just part of Twitter’s ongoing plans to not only host TV and video content on the network, but to monetize it (or help its creators monetize it) as well. In addition to Vine, one of the recent acquisitions that could help Twitter do that is Bluefin Labs, which specializes in tracking the real-time data about who is watching what show.

That kind of information — along with the data from Twitter’s partnership with Nielsen, announced last year — would in turn help Twitter appeal to advertisers who are looking for as much targeting information as they can get. And that appeal could be paying off already: according to a report from the Financial Times on Monday, Twitter has signed a major multi-year deal worth “hundreds of millions of dollars” with Starcom MediaVest Group, a large ad-buying firm that represents clients like Walmart and Coca-Cola.

Moves like these — and the launch of Twitter Music last week — reinforce just how much the company has evolved away from its original nature as a short-messaging service that gave you only 140 characters or less, and could be consumed quickly. Now, it is becoming a lot more like a broadcast network, or at least a willing handmaiden for broadcast networks, as CEO Dick Costolo predicted in a speech last year. But is that what users really want from Twitter?

This post was updated on April 24 to note that BBC America is a unit of BBC Worldwide and not a joint venture with Discovery Channel as was originally stated.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Shutterstock / Dmitris K and Eva Blue

Prince’s record label NPG records has filed a DMCA copyright complaint with Twitter over a series of videos containing Prince’s content that were posted to Vine, Twitter’s newest video platform, as The Next Web first reported.

The complaint asks Twitter to remove the eight video clips from Vine that contain Prince’s material. Twitter has not yet responded with any comment.

“These are unauthorized recordings and are unauthorized synchronizations. As such, I have a good faith belief that use of the copyrighted work described above is not authorized by the copyright owner (or by a third party who is legally entitled to do so on behalf of the copyright owner) and is not otherwise permitted by law. I hereby confirm that I believe the tracks identified in this email infringe my copyright.

We hereby request that you immediately remove our content 8 video clips from the vine.co platform, as accessible via the above links, as well as all other occurrences on the vine.co platform.”

While it’s unclear how much of an effect six-second videos might have on Prince’s music career, it’s somewhat of a validation for Twitter that serious musicians and celebrities would consider Vine a threat in terms of how media is distributed online. Twitter launched Vine back in January, allowing users to share short video clips and tweet them to the network, and you can now embed Vine videos on the web. It’s still uncertain how many users are sharing videos through Vine or how the startup will fit within Twitter’s ecosystem.

But it’s fair to say that if Prince has concerns about Vine, the rest of us should keep an eye on it too.

As Eliza Kern described in her post on the rumors, Bluefin’s technology allows broadcasters — and more importantly, brands — to see where and when their content is being discussed on social networks and elsewhere on the web. The company was founded by MIT scientist Deb Roy, who began by collecting every sound his young son made during a 3-year period and then used algorithms to detect patterns in that data (Bluefin’s CEO will be speaking at our paidContent Live conference in New York on April 17).

Television is where the money is

Twitter’s decision to concentrate on TV-related features and partnerships isn’t that surprising. As we’ve described before, the company has been coming under increasing pressure to generate meaningful amounts of revenue in order to justify a market value that is estimated to be in the $10 billion range, based on recent sales of its shares on the private market. And while Twitter has been building up its “promoted tweets” and other advertising-related features, the most obvious and lucrative source of revenue is still television and other video-related content.

Twitter's true strategy? If they are 2nd screen for TV, and take over TV audience measurement, they control both social and TV advertising?

—
Nova Spivack (@novaspivack) February 05, 2013

Twitter’s moves in this direction started with partnerships for specific events like the Academy Awards, where it helped broadcasters filter and aggregate tweets about the content, and then expanded with deals related to things like NASCAR and the Summer Olympics, where the company created customized portals or hubs and had its own staff of editors curating content related to the event. After the Olympics, the head of Twitter’s media partnerships bragged about how much traffic the service drove to NBC’s programming, and it’s clear the company wants more of those kinds of relationships.

Even the launch of Vine, the six-second video app that Twitter recently acquired, can be seen as another extension of this focus: while most people have been using the app to share short clips of their cats and other ephemera, there have already been advertisers and brands taking advantage of the new format — including The Gap — and it’s easy to see how those clips could become mini-advertisements.

Our 2nd @vineapp experiment: stop motion 1969 denim. What should we #Vine next? vine.co/v/bJ6QQYKuDgz

—
  (@Gap) January 28, 2013

It’s not just a desire for revenue that has driven Twitter into the arms of television, however. As Eliza noted in a post about the use of Twitter during the Super Bowl, the fact that the network works as a “second screen” for such events has been obvious for some time — and it makes sense for Twitter to capitalize on that in whatever ways it can. And as Peter Kafka pointed out at All Things Digital, adding analytics to its video-related partnerships via Bluefin would allow Twitter to make a better case for why brands should care (it also has a partnership with Nielsen).

Twitter should be about much more than just TV

So what’s wrong with Twitter getting into bed with NBC and other broadcasters, or becoming a handmaiden to traditional television? A couple of potential pitfalls showed themselves during the Olympics: one was the fact that Twitter’s content hub was unavailable to non-U.S. users because of geographic restrictions that its partner NBC was subject to. By now, we’ve grown used to Twitter content being unrestricted — except in special cases such as Germany’s request to remove Nazi tweets, when changes have to be made for legal reasons. A geo-gated Twitter just seems wrong.

Acq of Bluefin Labs by Twitter feels like their equivalent of the "offline cookie" - how to close the loop w advertisers re: effectiveness

—
Hunter Walk (@hunterwalk) February 05, 2013

The other incident that occurred during the Olympics was Twitter’s decision to shut down a journalist’s account after he criticized an executive at NBC and posted what the company said was a private email address. Twitter later admitted that this was mis-handled, but it raised the question of whose interests the company would be likely to protect if push came to shove: will the needs of broadcast partners take precedence over the needs of users? In some ways, they already have.

For me at least, getting into bed with television broadcasters and defining success as driving traffic to their programs is not as interesting a use of a global, real-time information platform as something like the “networked journalism” we saw during the Arab Spring and other events. Obviously, Twitter can still do things to help encourage that kind of activity as well, but if it doesn’t generate the same kind of revenue as a TV deal, how much attention will it get? Not much.

I am as much a fan of discussing shows like the Super Bowl on Twitter as anyone, but I don’t really need another way to find out about the latest NBC sitcom or reality show. I would much rather Twitter focused on filtering and curating the broader universe of discussion around important issues than boosting the viewership numbers of The Biggest Loser. Unfortunately, that’s where the money is.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Shutterstock / Dmitris K

The defining feature of Twitter used to be the brevity of its messages: 140 characters and no more. Debates periodically flared up about whether this would ever be increased, but Twitter made it clear that it had no intention of expanding the nature of a tweet — until it decided to do so itself, of course. Expanded tweets or “Twitter cards” were launched in stages, first with a redesign of the company’s website and then with the mobile apps, all of which allowed additional content from certain partners (photos, video, music links, etc.) to appear inside a frame within Twitter.

Six-second video clips — the essence of simplicity?

Now users can download the Vine application for iOS, which was developed by a company that Twitter recently acquired for an undisclosed sum, and create short video clips (no more than six seconds) that they can share on the network, which will show the entire clip inside an expanded tweet. Although they use video, the effect is similar to that created by Cinemagram, a service that lets users create small animated GIF images from photos, as well as Viddy or YouTube’s new Capture app.

To some — including Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, who raved about the experience on Twitter after the launch — the effect is artistic:

Vine is the most exciting thing I've seen in a while. Not just because of the team, because it brings an entirely new art form to the world.

—
Jack Dorsey (@jack) January 24, 2013

To others, however, having tiny video clips auto-play inside your Twitter stream is annoying (the clip that Vine used on its blog announcing the launch was a good example). As my GigaOM colleague Eliza Kern noted in her post on the news, other short video services such as 12seconds have not lasted very long once people grew tired of the novelty. Will Vine be any different? Animated GIFs have become part of the media sphere — with some sites such as Tumblr creating specific GIFs for news events like the presidential debates — but they are still a relatively niche attraction.

What is Twitter’s vision of the future?

But apart from the ephemeral nature of Vine clips themselves, for me the launch raises questions about what exactly Twitter sees as its unique value proposition in what has become an increasingly crowded media environment. Not so long ago, Jack Dorsey — who is widely admired as the product visionary behind Twitter, although he is no longer the chief product officer there — made it clear that simplicity was one of the core aspects of the service. Does showing movie clips inside a tweet really fit that description? You could argue that it’s better than full-length movies in a tweet, but still.

And what about the decision to acquire Vine instead of just partnering with it, or giving it the ability to embed content via expanded tweets? Jason Goldman — who was the former VP of product at Twitter before he left to join Twitter co-founder Evan Williams at Obvious Corp. — said in a tweet that he thought acquiring Vine and leaving it as a standalone entity (in much the same way Facebook did with Instagram) was a stroke of genius for the company, but others aren’t so sure.

Acquiring and launching Vine as a separate product and brand is one of the best product decisions Twitter has made.

—
Jason Goldman (@goldman) January 24, 2013

Perhaps Twitter sees the potential for Vine to be monetized by including product shots for commercial brands inside tweets, something that might help the company generate the kind of revenue it needs to justify its estimated $10-billion market value. That’s a goal that has also led Twitter to shut down partnerships with services like Instagram and Tumblr, which it sees as competitors, and restrict what others can do with Twitter data. But are those good decisions for users, or just for Twitter?

In a recent post about Twitter’s ambitions — or potential ambitions — to be a media company, John Battelle of Federated Media wrote about how the service could not only curate but eventually create media, and I argued that if it wants to do this, it is going to have to get a whole lot better at finding and recommending relevant content. Are millions of short video clips going to help it get there? I don’t see how. And adding more and more content to each individual tweet threatens to overwhelm a service that used to be a bastion of simplicity in an ocean of noise.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Shutterstock / Sam72