But you do have to confess that a lot of YouTube is "copyright-theft". The real question is what effect that "theft" has on the bottom line of the companies that hold the rights. Is it 1:1, 1:100 or can it/does it result in additional profit in some cases?

Nobody really knows the answer to this and anyone who states they do is just guessing.

Fair use, you mean.

I have never seen a full TV episode of a popular show on YouTube. But the file sharing sites have them, and in HD, and without ads and annotations. Guess where I get my full TV episodes from. Not Youtube.

I've watched PLENTY of full series on YouTube. However I don't watch so much mainstream.

You can still catch the latest English Premier League or Champions League action if you get there quick enough (in before the lock).

IIRC all of the Naruto (Anime) subs used to be up there and they were licensed to Viz Media.

They're much better at removing the stuff then they used to be but say three or so years ago YouTube was stuffed with full episodes. I remember watching almost all of "Everybody Hates Chris" on YouTube.

I watch full episodes of poker shows. Broken up into 10 minute clips of course. In the "old days" I watched full clips of the daily show and countless other shows I can't even remember now. I didn't have a TV and didn't need one because Youtube had all the shows I wanted to see.

I watched "air crash investigation" a few times. Since I didn't know this show existed, the existence of the clips was helpful to them in the form of free advertising.

Of course, I don't have cable or whatever, so I just download the episodes from real file sharing sites. But you can't blame Youtube for that, that's all on me.

Fuck google! Music videos dominate the most popular youtube videos, so I don't know why you're saying they are all user-produced. Milly Cirrus has 2 in the top 10. It's right there on their own page for crying out loud, do you even know what you are talking about or are you just one of the countless content theft fanboys?

http://www.youtube.com/videos?lg=EN&s=mp&t=a

I hope the courts throw the book at Google. I'm so sick of their holier than thou attitude while they take content and do whatever they want and make money hand over fist for doing it. They knowingly break the law and then use their clout to get content creators to succumb to their demands.

Until we take a stand against this kind of behavior, it will continue.

Either stop the behavior or change the laws so it isn't only big corporations who can get away with it. They sue the pants off individuals in their homes with some computers hooked up to the internet, but Google does exactly the same thing and expect people to pay them for it.

What really is the difference here between a file sharer with some songs on their computer and Google with those exact same songs on youtube? Why is the law different for google than it is for Jane Internet User?

Factor in the long tail. Do you think most views on youtube are not user-produced then?

Milly Cirrus has an advantage when competing with user-generated content because she has an expensive publicist.

The Miley Cyrus videos are most likely licensed as well. It's really not difficult for record companies to take this stuff down if they want to: hire an intern at $8/hr to do searches for your top 50 artists and report the videos to youtube (they are pretty damn responsive). Bam, problem solved for < $30k a year. If the intern can't find the stuff it's not going to be doing much harm.

No, there wasn't much user generated material at the beginning. I remember when I discovered youtube, I was shocked that how they were allowed to put so much copyrighted material online without any problem.

If it weren't for the high production value content, I'd argue Youtube would never have gotten as popular as it did.

I'm increasingly dismayed by how in our society we reward this kind of illegal behavior, whether you agree that it is moral, unethical, or whatever, it is against the law and repeatedly, these violations are accepted, promoted, and lead the owners of the sites to $300+ Million exits.

And then I remember where the U.S. got its land. I remember where Goodyear got his rubber. I remember where oil and diamonds and rare metals come from and wonder why we have laws at all. Why we have national borders at all. Why we have jails at all.

Yeah it's tempting to go after Viacom, News Corp etc., and as wrong as I think they are, I can't help feeling all this is just a symptom of a far bigger problem at a completely different level of abstraction. Edit for clarification: I agree with you that if we have laws we should follow them, but law should reflect culture not vice versa.

I'm not sure I'm with you on the production quality video necessity. A lot of youtubes virality has been stupid cat videos. While I'm sure there are people logging on and looking for naruto, I would bet most people don't find youtube for the first time searching for Naruto.