It is in YouTube's best interest to host popular videos in an effort to continue to enhance its viewers' experience as well as maintaining its dominance as the leading global provider of video content. In order to retain the benefits from such vast attention and network economies, vigilance toward copyright needs to be exercised as well as ensuring compliance with a multitude of copyright laws.
What does YouTube think about copyright
This short talk by Margaret Gould Stewart,who leads the user experience team at YouTube explains:
Source: http://www.ted.com/talks/margaret_stewart_how_youtube_thinks_about_copyright.html
(Stewart, M.G., 2010)
Below are some examples of how YouTube engages with copyright issues.
Lazy Sunday
A mentioned in the history section, YouTube came to prominence with the showing of the “Lazy Sunday’’ video. The New York Times reported that this clip had been downloaded 1.2 million times in a ten day period (Itzkoff, 2005). Two months later NBC contacted YouTube to request that the clip be removed.
Accordingly the clip was removed and the YouTube blog contained the following entry:
Thursday, February 16, 2006
Lazy Sunday
Hi Tubers! NBC recently contacted YouTube and asked us to remove Saturday Night Live's "Lazy Sunday: Chronicles of Narnia" video. We know how popular that video is but YouTube respects the rights of copyright holders. You can still watch SNL's "Lazy Sunday" video for free on NBC's website.
Some good news: we are happy to report that YouTube is now serving up more than 15 million videos streamed per day- that's nearly 465M videos streamed per month with 20,000 videos being uploaded daily.
Keep broadcasting!(YouTube, 2006a)
Shorter videos
In March 2006, YouTube changed its upload process, so that clips longer than 10 minutes could no longer be uploaded. The YouTube Blog gave the following reason.
Well, if you've followed our blog postings or any of the press articles, you know we're constantly trying to balance the rights of copyright owners with the rights of our users. We poked around the system a bit and found that these longer videos were more likely to be copyrighted videos from tv shows and movies than the shorter videos posted. However, we also recognize that there are legit content creators out there who may have videos over 10 mins, so we've created a Premium Content Program for those of you with professional-produced videos.(YouTube, 2006b)
Viacom Lawsuit
In 2007, Viacom launched a $1billion lawsuit against Google claiming that YouTube had violated copyright for unauthorized postings of Viacom copyrighted material.
On June 23 2010 YouTube reported:
Today, the court granted our motion for summary judgment in Viacom’s lawsuit with YouTube. This means that the court has decided that YouTube is protected by the safe harbor of the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA) against claims of copyright infringement. The decision follows established judicial consensus that online services like YouTube are protected when they work cooperatively with copyright holders to help them manage their rights online.
(Youtube 2010 as cited in http://techcrunch.com/2010/06/23/youtube-declares-victory-in-viacom-case/)
