‘Unauthorized’ YouTube videos
p2pnet.net news:- Less than 6% of “pirated” videos yanked from Google’s YouTube following complaints from Viacom actually attracted viewers, says a Vidmeter report.
Viacom is after YouTube for $1 billion, alleging massive copyrighted infringement in a suit The Economist called, “only the continuation of negotiations by other means”.
Now, “We have concluded that unauthorized copyright videos make up a relatively small portion of YouTube’s most popular videos and an even smaller portion of views,” says Vidmeter.com.
Videmeter, “gathers data from across the web to provide an accurate representation of the most popular online videos,” it says.
But, “Viacom called the study’s findings and methodology flawed’,” says Reuters. “Privately, another media industry source also disputed the conclusions,” and, “The Vidmeter study undercounts the volume of copyrighted content on YouTube by a significant margin,” a Viacom spokesman said in an e-mailed statement, says Reuters.
“Also contrary to popular perception, the report found that music videos were among the most-viewed category. ‘Even with these flaws, however, this study can put to rest Google’s protests that it doesn’t know about the massive copyright infringement taking place on YouTube,’ the Viacom spokesman added.”
Says Vidmeter in Analysis of Copyrighted Videos on YouTube.com:
From the research performed, we have concluded that unauthorized copyright videos make up a relatively small portion of YouTube’s most popular videos and an even smaller portion of views to YouTube’s most popular videos. While the study did find a fair number of blatantly pirated full-length clips from television shows and movies, the bulk of views to removed videos consisted of music videos and short clips from comedy sketches and unique sporting events.
It should be noted that the reason blatantly pirated full-length clips are not relatively popular may be that such videos are more diligently removed and thus do not have enough time to accumulate a critical amount of views. If this were the case, it may be argued that there is a demand for such content on YouTube, but it would still remain true that, in its current state, such content counts for only a very small fraction of YouTube’s popular video views.
Copyright Overlap
Many times during this study we found cases where copyright ownership for a video overlapped between two or more of the aforementioned media companies. For example, several clips from the show The OC were removed. This show airs on Fox (a News Corp company) but is produced by Time Warner. Because YouTube cites Time Warner as the copyright owner that requested the removal of these clips, we attributed the resulting views to Time Warner, but they could arguably be attributed to News Corp instead.
In the case of the music video Girlfriend by Avril Lavigne, 3 separate organizations – Viacom, Sony, and the RIAA – requested the removal of 3 different instances of that video. To explain why this happened, we can presume that the RIAA most likely requested a video removed as part of its general effort to prevent music piracy, Sony most likely requested a video removed because Avril is signed to their record label, and Viacom most likely requested the removal of a video because it was recorded from an airing on one of their subsidiary networks such as MTV or VH1.
Copyright Owner Control
In many cases, copyright owners have requested the removal of videos from other when uploaded by other YouTube users when the copyright owners themselves have uploaded identical videos to their own accounts. Take for example NBC’s Dick in a Box. NBC requested that YouTube remove no less than 19 instances of Dick in a Box as uploaded by other users, while NBC itself uploaded and shows the same video in its account.
Click here for a .pdf of the report.
Also See:
$1 billion – Viacom videos: $4.17 each, MNarch 16, 2007
The Economist – Old media sue, March 14, 2007
Reuters – Big media videos play small role on YouTube: study, April 5, 2006
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