In Praise of Illegal YouTube Videos in Times of Public Grief
The news of Robin Williams’ death spread in the usual ways. At dinner, I received a smartphone push notification from a news app containing the blunt message that Williams had died. On Twitter, the comedian’s colleagues and admirers mourned him with sad, laudatory tweets; the most touching tributes rose to the top, appearing again and again as I scrolled through my feed. On Facebook, friends and family wrote their own, more personal remembrances, naming the Williams roles they treasured, sharing memories from decades past. On Instagram, a haunting photograph of Williams and his young daughter, taken long ago, quickly circulated. Somehow, it seemed to capture the actor completely.
These technology-tinged mourning habits, now so familiar, certainly act as a salve, especially after a sudden, unexpected celebrity death. To know that you are sharing in sadness with your contemporaries and close ones can be reassuring.
But for me, in my own mourning, the most potent resource in the grieving process has been a website that is stocked with artifacts that are both essential and, for the most part, illegal: YouTube.
I could dispatch with Twitter and Facebook and Instagram, in favor of the television news, newspapers, print magazines, and personal conversation. But YouTube and its trove of Robin Williams clips has proved vital for both my remembrance of Williams and my mourning. Bite-sized reminders of Williams’ versatility and timing abound on YouTube: There are all of the wonderful clips of Williams as the shape-shifting genie in Aladdin, the hyperkinetic DJ in Good Morning, Vietnam, the inspirational boarding school prof in Dead Poets Society. You can enjoy clips from his standup sets, his breakthrough work on Mork and Mindy; his later, stranger roles in Death to Smoochy and One Hour Photo and Bicentennial Man. There are the interviews, improv sets, late-night appearances. YouTube offers a nearly complete compendium, in small doses, of the man’s life and work.
It is also almost certainly against the law. These videos aren’t uploaded by NBC or CBS or Disney; they are uploaded by YouTube users with names like “moviebuff103” and “artchannel333” and “ArcticCockroaches.”
These are not the copyright or license holders. Many of the videos I mentioned above are accompanied, in the information section, by disclaimers like this one, on a clip from Williams’ HBO special: “FAIR USE NOTICE: This video may contain copyrighted material.”
This isn’t actually fair use, of course, nor would a rinky-dink legal disclaimer in a YouTube video’s description hold up in court. The uploaders face takedown notices from the rightful owners of the material, and potential fines for knowingly hosting copyrighted content.
(The content providers may also condone the uploads, as a Google spokesman pointed out to me. Studios have the option to leave the uploads on the site for any reason –– to track popularity, or sharing metrics, for example –– and also to serve advertisements against them, to bring in revenue.)
And yet: On days like Monday, these copyright infringers are heroes of a compromised sort. The studios will not upload these clips, which we all need to see in some way; and so these desperadoes have instead. Enabling our ability to take in and appreciate the range of Williams’ career –– and this goes, too, for Philip Seymour Hoffman, Elaine Stritch, and dozens of others of recently deceased performers –– has been essential in processing the death, both for myself and as a collective. It has been heartening to watch the clips, some familiar, others new, that friends and colleagues have chosen to share through Twitter and Facebook. And it has been therapeutic, too, to trawl through the vast library of Robin Williams scenes that have brought me joy in the past, getting lost in his diverse body of work as YouTube recommends more and more videos, each promising a new glimpse of the man’s talent.
YouTube should certainly ban, and actively police, illegal uploads of full movies, comedy specials, and television episodes. Leave those nefarious activities to the torrent message board lurkers and Eastern European blogrolls. But its trove of short clips, searchable and sortable, otherwise completely unavailable to a grieving public, have become essential resources following the passing of a star. It eases the pain; it spreads the actor’s various high points to an audience who may have missed them and can now appreciate them anew; and, most importantly, it retrieves the memories of the deceased at his or her highest public moments, making those pinnacles both easy to share and to enjoy privately, quickly.
Illegal? Yes. Indispensable? Absolutely. Now get to YouTube and enjoy Robin Williams at his finest.
