“We’ve been really proactive and cooperative with the rights holders,” says Supan. “If we’re alerted and we have knowledge that there’s been videos uploaded that are unauthorized, we will remove them immediately. Because we’ve been so cooperative and so responsive, I think we’re in a really good position.”
They’ve taken other steps, too. In March they instituted a 10-minute limit on uploads, which will prevent users from uploading complete episodes of The Office or 24. (Independent, non-infringing content producers can sign up as “YouTube Directors,” which will allow them to eschew the time limit.) They’ve also developed more back-end technologies to simplify and automate the identification of infringing files, and to “fingerprint” removed videos so they can’t be uploaded again later.
YouTube is also taking an active role in educating its users, a large chunk of whom are young teenagers. “Uploading programming that’s on your hard drive but you don’t own is illegal,” says Supan. “They’re learning. They don’t realize that television isn’t free.”
All these steps, so far, have earned YouTube plaudits for being a “good corporate citizen” (as the Motion Picture Association of America recently called it). For all the talk of YouTube as a “Napster for video,” Supan is emphatic that the opposite is true. “Napster was a black market for illegal music-file swapping. We’re not a black market. And the biggest difference is that you can’t download anything on YouTube.”
Actually, that’s not exactly true. Already, several sites have sprung up that make downloading YouTube’s Flash clips to your hard drive as easy as copying, pasting, and right-clicking “Save As.” And other programs make it possible to convert those to iPod-ready formats. But with videos so easily and instantaneously available on the site, not everyone feels the need. “If there’s something really totally awesome that I want to have forever, yeah, I’ll go and download it,” says Beau. “But the older you get, you realize you don’t have to own it all.”
When I bring up the site’s marvelous appeal as a nostalgia repository, and I ask Supan if it’s only going after big fish like South Park and Brokeback Mountain (an entire version of which appeared on YouTube for a short time), looking to take down mainstream videos like that as soon as they’re up, she corrects me. “We’re not ‘going after’ any content on the site. We don’t control the content on our site. We’re just a service provider. It’s all posted at the discretion of the users.” And, she adds, “the reality is that it’s hard to say what’s uploaded by the content creator, the user, and what is not. And so therefore one can’t assume at this point.”
It’s a tacit admission that copyrighted material not only exists on the site, but it’s also a primary reason why so many viewers log on every day. But it’s also true that more and more mainstream content producers are catching on to YouTube — and are looking for ways to leverage its popularity by uploading content to it themselves.
