YouTube has become a massive phenomenon over the past year as the leading site for video sharing and user generated content. Built on $11.5 million of venture capital the innovative website now boasts 100 million video views a day.YouTube has recently come under fire over copyright infringement. Many users are uploading videos that contain copyrighted content potentially making YouTube themselves responsible for copyright infringement since they host the video.
The billionaire Mark Cuban has gone as far to say that these copyright concerns will be partly responsible for the dramatic decline of YouTube. I don't really like to disagree with a billionaire but I personally don't think this will cause YouTube to dramatically decline. However it does have the potential to be quite damaging.
For one minute let's compare YouTube to file sharing. It looks like file sharing is here to stay, at least for some time, and that allows people to easily access copyrighted TV shows, movies and more. While file sharing exists and is violating copyright I hardly see YouTube being taken down for hosting user submitted content.
After all YouTube generally only contains music videos, short video clips of movies and TV shows, or homemade videos with copyrighted soundtracks in the background. These are usually low quality and more often than not have the potential to advertise the genuine artist.
This is why Warner Music has agreed to license its huge catalogue of songs to the millions of ordinary people who upload their homemade videos to YouTube.
This does rain on Mark Cuban's argument a little bit, but let's not be too hasty. Just because one company is happy with YouTube, it does not mean everyone is happy. Universal Music Group has already promised to sue if YouTube does not do a better job of preventing copyright violations.
There is a bright side though. The legal engagements YouTube has over copyright are just going to help its publicity. YouTube is by no means as popular as it could be and there are still people that have not heard of YouTube, even if it is the 14th busiest site on the internet.
Also for those of you that are already jumping up and down thinking YouTube will be in the clear because of the backing from Warner Music read the small print. For the deal to happen YouTube developed a royalty-tracking system that detects when uploaded videos contain copyrighted material.
This technology will allow Warner Music (and anyone else who joins in) to review the video and decide whether it wants to approve or reject it. This could potentially step on a lot of the freedom that YouTube users have enjoyed, and potentially damage YouTube. We will have to wait and see how this turns out. Mark Cuban could be onto something after all.
