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YouTube boom may be deflated by copyright issues
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It’s been more than a little breathtaking, watching YouTube gain heat, light and speed as it streaks across the Internet.
By making it easy for people to upload their own videos and search and play others’, the site has unleashed demand that nobody else quite understood existed.
Before YouTube, short films were mostly the province of French animators gunning for one of the lesser Oscars whose awarding time most folks use for a snack break.
Now, some 100 million videos per day are viewed there, YouTube says, none of them more than 10 minutes long.
They encompass everything from LonelyGirl15’s recently famous fake musings about teenage life to legitimate amateur video to copyrighted clips from “The Daily Show” that their owner, Comedy Central, treats, so far, with a don’t-ask-don’t-sue policy.
Increasingly, though, there have been suggestions that some might sue, which is why YouTube’s content-sharing deal with giant Warner Music Group, announced this week, is so potentially important.
If the cloud of copyright issues is removed, YouTube will have a chance to keep the exponential growth growing. Already, right now, the site accounts for three of every five videos watched online, according to the Hitwise audience measurement service.
YouTube has become the place people look first when there’s anything interesting captured on camera. It could be the White Stripes “appearing” on “The Simpsons,” Ashlee Simpson’s McDonald’s meltdown, or Virginia Sen. George Allen’s debate response indicating that he thinks asking him whether he’s Jewish is an “aspersion.”
Go to YouTube (youtube.com), try a search or two for something you’ve heard about, and there, in all likelihood, it will be free, watchable, clickable, e-mailable, shareable, blog-importable.
It’s pretty much the dream clip, so long as the legitimate copyright holder hasn’t noticed and asked for it be it to be disappeared, like as when NBC last winter famously got YouTube to remove copies of “Saturday Night Live’s” sparkling “Lazy Sunday” rap parody. That video, some observers think, is what pushed YouTube into Web superstar status.
Even people without a viewing agenda can wander onto the site and bounce from clip to clip for hours on end, like as folks of an earlier generation used to do when cable TV seemed new and exciting.
But observers have been saying for months that something had to give there. Far too much of the YouTube content, especially the most popular content, flirts with someone else’s copyright. The most ominous predictions anticipated those of billionaire NBA owner Mark Cuban, who blogged this week about YouTube heading for a Napster-like fall.
“And it’s not just copyright lawsuits that will end up severely impacting YouTube’s business,” Cuban writes in his entry, “The Coming Dramatic Decline of YouTube,” on Blog Maverick (blogmaverick.com). “It’s that their business is too easy for the people who own the copyrights to copy.”
Cuban, it should be noted, was also the guy who predicted, at the South by Southwest Interactive Festival back in 1999, that MP3 technology wouldn’t last six months.
But regardless of its critics’ track records, YouTube has been paying attention.
It made a deal with NBC back in June that allowed it to host NBC promotional clips and solicited homemade promos for NBC’s “The Office.” A number of those, quite polished and quite funny, showed on the broadcast network over the summer.
NBC Universal digital content chief Jeff Gaspin said it doesn’t bother him that, for instance, almost every moment of the romantic comedy’s central relationship, between office-mates Jim and Pam, is now up on YouTube, some 15 videos of eight or so minutes apiece amounting, in total, to almost a mini-version of the Season 2 Two DVD set.
“If the Internet helps create buzz for us, great,” Gaspin said, reasoning that the Jim and Pam relationship could join TV classics like such as Sam and Diane (”Cheers”) and Ross and Rachel (”Friends”), but first viewers have to find out about it.
When you take into account NBC’s moderate shift in stance, and, for instance, Comedy Central’s wink-and-a-nod at the proliferation of “Daily Show” and “Colbert Report” clips that users upload, you understand that many copyright holders seem to be deciding that the promotional value of YouTube appearances is more valuable than any revenue that might be gained by forcing users to the holders’ own Web sites.
But others aren’t so sanguine. Last week, Doug Morris, CEO of the giant Universal Music Group, was speaking of YouTube and the less-copyright-dependent MySpace when he said, “These new businesses are copyright infringers and owe us tens of millions of dollars.”
Not only are Universal artists’ music videos on the site, but popular songs are background music in thousands upon thousands of YouTube’s amateur videos.
Morris wasn’t satisfied with YouTube’s policy of taking down copyrighted material upon the holder’s request.
This week, as if in response to Universal’s beef, YouTube announced a deal with the giant Warner Music Group that may pave the way for a more peaceful coexistence with copyright.
In essence, Warner music videos will go up on YouTube for its users to enjoy.
Users will also be granted license to use songs from artists in the stable, which includes the Atlantic, Warner Bros., Rhino and Sire labels.
In return, YouTube is implementing a system that will search its site for copyrighted material and pay royalties to the copyright holder, provided that holder has authorized YouTubers to use its content.
A hundred questions remain, among them: Will the recording artists buy into it; how good will the search be; and can YouTube, which is trying to earn money through advertising, afford all the royalty payments?
STEVE JOHNSON
Chicago Tribune
