Q1: Are these contents legal?
A1: Yes. We are Youtube suggested business model, we have “Standard YouTube License” and “Creative Commons License“. TopCools is a thin layer above Youtube, Vimeo, Facebook and etc. Google does have contracts with Vevo(joint venture of Universal Music Group (UMG), Google, Sony Music Entertainment (SME) and Abu Dhabi Media), increasingly artists and IP owners tend to sign “AD-profit-sharing” with Youtube at the beginning or after they proved that they have ownership. As partner and public API user, Topcools is also covered by these contracts. As legal as Youtube, Vimeo and Facebook. Most contents are granted permit and streaming-live from Youtube, Facebook, Vimeo….etc via their “Open APIs”(contents are 100% identical to what are on those sites); We strictly follow Youtube, Facebook and twitter API rules to serve their advertisements on their content playing page (AD income is too low and we are not for profitable at current form); We have cycle-accurate tuning(the best in the world, our founder was a key performance architect at Intel) of every layer from app software, OS, storage and in-house in-memory-database and have a cost of about 1/5th other market players. and by continue polish our full-stack and we plan to offer cloud full-stack to external entities such as enterprise, to make profit. For performance consulting, high speed web software and high speed cloud full-stack service, please contact: editor@topcools.com).

Aside for contents that Google has copy-rights, there are Fair-use that says you can reuse copyright-protected material under certain circumstances without getting permission from the copyright owner.

Topcools is more of a directory, a neutral 3rd party content rating and selection service which gears to recommend high quality content to viewers and aggregate viewers’ recommendation. Topcools is very tightly integrated with Youtube and Facebook, many data and contents are shared in-between. We expand the reach of Youtube, Facebook & Vimeo contents and also enrich Facebook, Twitter with good contents. Our editors’ selected and verified user recommendations, personalized “My Favorites”, classification and elegant design are mean to save user time and headache to find good contents. In addition, we filter out those fake, unhealthy, violent and those high-ranking but without much artistic value or pump up by manipulation. We give selected content more credit, thus more quality time to viewers.

As Youtube become more popular, then trend is for most artist to put an free copy on Youtube for advertisement. Occasionally, there are copy-rights claims by content owner, which end-up either Google pay them or deleted. So the thinking of content on Youtube/Topcools are illegal are incorrect.

Q2: What values will Topcools bring to the table?
A2: Topcools is not purely about cool UI design but facilitating the ease of finding the coolest and high value works. We emphasize information quality, artistic quality, classification, rating and rankings. The combination of editors’ selection/rating and users’ ranking/rating give content and author credit and confirmation of high and master-piece quality, as we are a neutral 3rd party that has no invested-interest with the artists and we are trying to building trust of and on the interests of viewers; We enable viewers avoiding hard-works of digging for good content and more time enjoy high-quality content. Topcools’ editors and other users help aggregating all the coolest, amazing and master-pieces from millions of websites, into this single location, classified them, verify their highest quality among identical name(from hundreds of uploaders, musicians & amateur players), so that users don’t have to waste time to looking for the best contents like a needle in the sea . We also have good search engine, My Favorites list, user editing and posting capability, so that you can view and save all your favorites in one place and access anytime and anywhere and in any device (Topcools has unlimited browser width, can transform and adaptively fit into any screen size, excellent support of smart-phones, pads, TVs in addition to PCs, you can test by phone, pad or shrinking browser). We also has very little Google ADs(“forced” by Google and Topcools doesn’t have control and Topcools doesn’t place any ad itself) to enable excellent user experience. More details are in Usage Term.