But following a deal negotiated by US major labels to gain an ownership stake in YouTube - shortly before the service was bought by Google - the so-called ‘user generated content’ (UGC) sites are facing increased legal pressure. Leading the legal assault against YouTube and its competitors is Universal Records’ Doug Morris, who claims that ‘these new businesses are copyright infringers and owe us tens of millions of dollars.’
So far Universal has launched suits in the US against not only Bolt and Grouper - two of YouTube’s competitors - but also social networking giant MySpace, owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation. Universal’s filing against MySpace argues that the site ‘encourages, facilitates and participates in the unauthorised reproduction, adaptation, distribution and public performance’ of music and video.
In a bid to face up to their responsibilities to rightsholders, YouTube and MySpace have begun blocking increasing amounts of copyrighted material, with the latter introducing a system allowing rightsholders to flag up infringing music or video.
MySpace has also engaged Gracenote to provide filtering. Gracenote will review music recordings uploaded by users to their MySpace profiles by comparing those files with those on its own extensive database of copyrighted material. However, it is understood that externally-hosted players such as those offered by Sonific and MySpaceMP3Player.net will not be included and may offer users a way to circumvent the vetting of uploaded material.
What’s more, video recognition is a far more complex task than audio recognition. Companies like Gracenote can be used to identify the audio component, but in the mashed-up world of user generated content, there’s no guarantee that the video on sites like MySpace and YouTube matches the audio.
Google’s US financial statement shows that USD $200 million was set aside in escrow as part of the company’s acquisition of YouTube in case of future copyright liabilities. Rumours suggest that a further $50 million may have gone to each of the major music and movie studios that have negotiated a stake in YouTube - though EMI has so far studiously avoided a pact with the video-sharing site. (Of course as equity it is unlikely that any of this money will reach the pockets of musicians or actors.)
Yet even before the Google purchase it’s clear that YouTube saw the writing on the wall when it instituted a rule - designed to prevent whole TV shows and movies from being uploaded - whereby only accredited video directors could add clips longer than a certain number of minutes. Informal investigations suggest that YouTube has a number of blocks already in place, including some level of manual filtering (hardcore pornography, for example, is not greatly in evidence at YouTube - unlike on most filesharing services).
Recently more than 30,000 videos were taken down following pressure from the Japanese rights society (JASRAC), while US broadcaster Comedy Central has requested that all its clips be removed. Comedy Central is owned by Viacom, which also owns MTV - potentially one of the big losers if YouTube and MySpace become major retailers of digital music videos.