About a year ago, the legal eagles for several media companies clued into the vast amount of copyright issues that come along with user-generated content and they linked arms to create principles against copyright infringement of user-generated content and video sharing.

The principles released were quite dry, but essentially the agreement indicates that UGC sites must make warning signs visible when users are uploading to warn of the repercussions of copyright infringement.
The purpose of the guidelines was to eliminate infringed content on UGC services, encourage uploads of original UGC, accommodate the fair use of copyrighted content, and of course, protection of privacy.
Basically these principles come as a threat to owners of UGC campaigns and UGC sites, indicating that should infringed content show up on their site, they can expect to be sued.

Since then, to the best of our knowledge, none of the participating companies have sued any UGC contest or site. NBC however, one of the big name supporters of the guidelines seems to have ignored the rules it agreed to stand behind with last year’s news release.

Set to debut this month is NBC.com’s online show Fears, Secrets and Desires described by the teaser site as “an original online series [created by users] sharing their deepest, darkest secrets; their unimaginable fears; their scandalous desires.”  A great idea and all except for the fact that a man named Frank Warren already came up with the idea in January of 2005 under a somewhat familiar name to the general public, popular PostSecret.

No rumbles of legal battles have surfaced yet, but the hypocrisy of it all does suggests that NBC may follow the cheeky childhood mantra some rules are just meant to be broken.