To the Media, YouTube Is a Threat and a Tool

Six of the top 20 most-watched videos on YouTube.com as of yesterday came from movies, TV shows, commercials or music videos. Viewed more than 5 million times each, they include clips from NBC's "America's Got Talent," the movie "Napoleon Dynamite" and Shakira's "Hips Don't Lie" music video.

Posting copyrighted clips violates the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act. But under that law, YouTube and similar sites cannot be held liable if they have a mechanism for taking down copyrighted materials "expeditiously." YouTube said it plans to launch technology that will help it automatically identify copyrighted content. Rival site Guba, which has about 2 million monthly users, has its own filtering technology that blocks copyrighted goods from being posted more than once.

Tim Wu, a law professor at Columbia University, predicted that content owners will find a middle ground between yanking everything and letting YouTube users have free reign. "It would in some ways be a suicide pact for them to take down everything, because they would lose the attention" that the Web generates, he said.

Already, NBC, CBS, Warner Music and others have inked deals to provide YouTube with officially sanctioned videos. In some cases, YouTube is sharing ad revenue with content owners.

Not all YouTube users see copyrighted content as the main attraction of the site, where users post more than 100,000 clips daily.

Rebeccah Snyder, a 26-year-old college student from Ypsilanti, Mich., is a regular contributor who posts videos of herself talking about her life. "I was never on [YouTube] looking for the 'South Park' episodes or the jokes from 'The Colbert Report,' " Synder said. "It's always been a community thing."

But for many, the TV shows are the big draw.

Lawrence Lee, a 22-year-old who lives in Arlington, has posted "Daily Show" clips to YouTube and doesn't worry too much about copyright infringement. "There's been such a separation from my generation in that area. Not many people are as concerned about the copyright issue," Lee said. "People want to have entertainment. People want to share their experience with their friends. This is not really going to change all that much until [TV] networks get behind using this new technology to push their media out."

Another user, Jeff Reifman, said he was upset to discover that clips he and others had posted of "The Daily Show" were removed Friday.

Reifman said he had felt comfortable posting clips after the show's star, Jon Stewart, seemed to endorse video sharing in an interview with Wired magazine.

Removing its fare from YouTube is a move Comedy Central will come to regret, Reifman said. "All the people who posted videos are volunteer marketers for Comedy Central," he said. "The network benefits from people talking about their programming, becoming the water-cooler chatter at the office. They've shot themselves in the foot."

Some companies apparently recognize the appeal of illicitly copied videos and try to make their material look pirated to generate excitement among users.

Nike Inc., for example, posted the same short video of soccer star Ronaldinho on YouTube, once under the user name "nikesoccer" and again under the "joeB" moniker. Nike spokeswoman Morgan Shaw acknowledged that the company posts videos under different names to appeal to teen audiences.

"It's really, really common" for companies to try to pose as average users, YouTube's Supan said, adding that the company encourages TV and movie studios and big advertisers to upload videos under their company names. "Users want to know it's legitimate content."