Can YouTube survive with video sharing restrictions?

YouTube, the popular video sharing website owned by Google, is facing a $1bn lawsuit from rival media owner Viacom for copyright infringement over the use of unauthorised clips from TV shows, films and other entertainment produced by the US media conglomerate.

The colossal lawsuit could represent a watershed moment in YouTube's history and the end of its fledging video advertising service.

YouTube has also argued that the lawsuit has serious repercussions for internet users all over the world. It says the legal action "threatens the way hundreds of millions of people legitimately exchange information, news, entertainment, and political and artistic expression".

If Viacom is successful can YouTube continue to flourish? Does the lawsuit threaten our freedom to roam and interact on the internet unhindered by new laws?

Well, If they are making good (advertising?) revenue, whilst"broadcasting" copyright controlled material,damn straight, they should pay the relevant bodies/copyright owners.

As an aside, PRS the UK collection agency for music royalties have recently done a deal with youtube, to collect royalties on behalf of UK music copyright holders (although the way that this will in fact work, is far from perfect) 

I dont think they are though. As far as I'm aware Youtube is huge succes as far as the user uptake etc is concerned, but far from a cash cow for Google.

They are already starting to accept longer video files (the restriction used to be 10mins) which opens up the door to advertising. Nobody wants to sit trhough a 30sec ad for a 1 min video, but longer content will help Google monetise its service better.

As for Viacom........well, if only they could pay more attention to one of their franchises - Southpark, these guys seem to get this new connected world a whole lot better than their bosses.

A proportion of Youtube's traffic is copywrited video of some description - but by no means all I manage an artist Devvo that has several million very hapy viewers all over Youtube and other video sites - Devvo fans and us will not be effected by this as we are happy with the situation.
There are many many many other creatives from your daily V loggers to some amazing animators such as David Firth or Cyriak... 

Youtube may or may not suffer - we don't really care because but the demand for a full sharing video search has been established way beyond pirated material - and so someone will fill that demand and provide a video service that is required... 

The interesting route to monetise this whole area lay beyond advertising but in sponsor integration and advertiser funded original programming - EQAL the people behing LonelyGirl15 and Kate Modern are the closes to getting this right in my book -

Cheers

Bob Slayer
www.bobslayer.com  

If the Internet is like the Wild West then YouTube have been riding around on horse back with a rocket propelled grenade launcher. They may be a behemoth but they still have a lot to improve in terms of how they monteize their traffic. I've tried to run campaigns with them but the ways to target a user on youtube are absurdly limited, at least they were when I last dealt with them. We were looking to run activity for a popular music based video game and we couldnt target MPU's to searches for key terms such as the names of the bands in the game etc. Furthermore the sales reps seemed to know less about it than we did.