YouTube.com's Copyright Challenge - Technology Evangelist

YouTube is probably best known for (and popular today because of) the wide array of copyrighted material users have posted to the site. Here are a few examples that work today but may not in the future if YouTube removes them:

Saturday Night Live Skit - Fred Garvin, Male Prostitute

Baby Einstein - Baby Newton

Knight Rider Intro

Great content with one big catch: it's illegal.

I imagine one of the reasons YouTube hasn't rolled out video advertising as bumpers to the content on their site is the copyright problem they're dealing with. While it's a problem to publish other's copyrighted material without permission, it's an even bigger problem to profit from the work of others without their permission.

Will YouTube figure out a way to scrub the copyrighted material from their site? Perhaps. At this point they appear to be taking a reactionary approach to it, which works well for users but probably not as well for copyright holders.

Perhaps YouTube will figure out a way to share profits generated from uploaded copyrighted material with the original copyright holder? For example, YouTube could kick some money back to Disney for each view of Baby Einstein videos on their site.

The challenge YouTube seems to face today is dealing with the fact that copyrighted content drives a considerable amount of traffic to their site. If they truly scrubbed all copyrighted material from their site tomorrow, what would be left? I'll address one answer to this in a future post.

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