YouTube cracks down

YouTube has removed 29549 Japanese videos from it’s site following a complaint by Japanese rights holders. I was a bit confused by this statement at first until I remembered the tons of anime that’s on the site.

Some people are blamming google for this move but that’s hardly relevant. This has happened before as it has always been YouTube’s policy to remove videos when the copyright holders complain about it. This removal is just very large in scope.

YouTube’s policy on copyrighted material is simple. They make it very clear that users shouldn’t upload something they don’t have the copyright to and even restrict video length to a maximum of 10 minutes. That being said they can no more stop a person from putting something copyrighted up there than the post office can stop someone from sending a copyrighted game to their friend by mail. Copyright holders want YouTube to start policing the content themselves and be held accountable for any copyrighted material that makes it’s way onto the site. This doesn’t work with their current functionality due to the sheer volume of videos that go up on the site. That doesn’t change the simple fact that it’s better to have the multi million dollar company accountable than some 12 year old with a paper route who’s uploading Naruto episodes.

No worries about powet.tv’s videos. Any use of copyrighted characters or clips are covered by fair use as portions are used for review purposes and never used in a way that would cause a loss of profit to the copyright holder. We’re part of that small chunk of users who use YouTube for legitimate purposes along with all these girls who like to tape themselves shaking their booties to their favourite music. God bless every last one of them.

The future of YouTube is always a bit unknown due to it’s nature. Let’s hope the restriction of copyrighted material causes as little hinderance to legitimate users as possible. And if you’re part of that majority of people who go to YouTube solely for the copyrighted content you can cross your fingers all you want but there’s not much legal protection for what you want to do.