Unauthorized Videos: An Never Ending Story

Filed in archive Industry , Video on January 16, 2007

The New York Times features a piece on the film industry and YouTube. What is eye opening is the level of effort expended to report copyright violations. NBC Universal has three employees working full-time on that. They report 1,000 takedown requests a month. Video companies continue to demand content filtering, though there is little evidence that they will be any more effective or less expensive.

Rick Cotton, NBC Universal's general counsel, estimated that more than half the NBC Universal videos on YouTube were unauthorized. "There is only so much we can do" to remove copyrighted videos. YouTube users "can always put up another."