A Modest Construct

YouTube is no stranger to the news recently. One of the media darlings of the Web 2.0 wave, it is one of those phenomenons that offered nothing more than infrastructure and an iffy interface, but managed to become a brand-name behemoth because of user content. Now it faces two problems: first, how the hell do you turn a free lunch into a profitable cafeteria? Second, how do you deal with the issue that much of the users’ content isn’t really their own content at all?

On May 24, lawyers for Viacom Inc.’s Paramount Pictures convinced a federal judge in San Francisco to issue a subpoena requiring YouTube to turn over details about a user who uploaded dialog from the movie studio’s “Twin Towers,” according to a copy of the document.

YouTube promptly handed over the data to Paramount, which on June 16 sued the creator of the 12-minute clip, New York City-based filmmaker Chris Moukarbel, for copyright infringement, in federal court in Washington.

That YouTube chose to turn over the data, rather than simply remove the offending video from its site — as it did Friday when it agreed to take down 30,000 videos at the request of a group of Japanese media companies — came as a surprise to copyright experts.

And now YouTube is safely(?) within the investment portfolio of Google, whose own video service failed to make even a dent in YouTube’s market share, as it were.

Here’s the rub: I’ve no doubt that Google will take considerably better care to hide user privacy than YouTube was in the above case. But, as Google’s concessions to China prove, they aren’t afraid to put their stock price above the quality or completeness of their service. I would not be surprised if Google did make every effort to remove videos which offend copyrights. It would also, then, not surprise me if YouTube’s traffic dried up like a puddle in the desert sun.

I don’t mean to make it sound as though YouTube is little more than a horde of lawless bandits, wickedly profiting from the theft of intellectual property, but that that whole point of the service—sharing videos—had little respect for the vagaries of copyright law. If User A thought last night’s Daily Show clip was hilarious and wants to show User B, he’s not going to care very much about whether or not he has “express written consent” to distribute it. We’re in an era where remixable and quickly distributable content is the norm, not an outlier—as much as it irks labels and studios, the old rules don’t apply. The **AA (MPAA and RIAA) likes to make YouTube users and movie downloaders out to be vicious, conniving, motherless bastards robbing the poverty-stricken organizations of their last pennies. Like just about everything that comes out of the **AA, this is crap.

But I digress. The MPAA is like the crotchety old man in everyone’s neighborhood who hobbles out onto his stoop to wave his newspaper threateningly at kids whose football rolled into his lawn. My point is that, like Napster, an organization under the watchful and stringent (not to mention myopic) eye of this incontinent, senile fool will never take off with users. Control tends to scare off originality. YouTube as we know it—the place for online video, the trendy go-to destination for all things audiovisual—will cease to exist, and will morph into one of two things.

1. It will become a place for media creators and media creators only—a little like DeviantArt, but for video. I see two problems with this: one, video quality is complete crap once it’s been processed into an FLV file. Like Google Video, though, future versions of YouTube may store a high-quality AVI for download as well. Even if YouTube does turn into a thriving community for video auteurs and filmmakers in training, it won’t have anything in common with the near-complete compendium of broadcasted material that YouTube is today, and thus will enjoy only a limited traffic stream, and consequently a limited revenue stream, as well.
2. It will become little more than Google’s search engine for copylefted and public domain video—with maybe a smattering of ‘illegal’ works up there as well. In that case, it would require a significant effort to properly name and tag these videos (as good as Google’s search is, it can’t search full motion videos, AFAIK), which wouldn’t be done by a community, because it wouldn’t exist anymore.

In either case, the users find somewhere else to engage in their “piracy” and Google’s left with the problem of monetizing a service with little desirable content and nobody to look at it. Hell, YouTube has a hard enough time monetizing their current setup, and they’re one of the most popular sites on the internet!

Personally, I don’t think the YouTube saga can ever end well. It’s one more casualty in the swath of **AA’s scythe, doomed by its own publicity, and the zeal of stupid, stupid media companies.