COPYCENSE

“It would be easy to call the venture-backed, San Mateo-based YouTube the Napster of video, an outlaw startup rocketing onto dotcom radar screens on the backs of rights-holders. But that’s a designation that the year-old company desperately wants to avoid. YouTube is far friendlier to copyright owners than the peer-to-peer sharing pioneer, and offers to take any material off its servers when a rights-holder complains (as NBC did earlier this month, asking the company to remove the popular Saturday Night Live “Lazy Sunday” clip from its site.)

“YouTube execs point out that, unlike Napster, they control what’s on their site and can boot users who are breaking the law. Hollywood execs aren’t reaching for the emergency telephones that connect them to their lawyers — at least not yet.”

Brad Stone. Video Napster? Newsweek. March 7, 2006.

See also:

Jim Kerstetter, Greg Sandoval, et al. Does Video Have a Napster Problem? News.com. March 13, 2006.

CopyCense™: K. Matthew Dames on the intersection of business, law and technology. A business venture of Seso Digital LLC.