The kid-in-a-candy-store exuberance that comes from surfing the site and finding stuff you haven’t seen in years — Chris Elliot’s “Man Under the Seats” on Letterman! A young Adam Sandler on Remote Control! — has helped fuel YouTube’s explosive popularity. Still, those clips, even though you can’t see them anywhere else anymore, are copyrighted. And, of course, so, too, is the “Lazy Sunday” clip. When NBC asked YouTube to take it down in February, it did so in a flash. Same thing happened later with Natalie Portman’s gangsta rap. When CBS complained that it was hosting a news clip of autistic high-school hoops phenom Jason McElwain scoring 20 points in four minutes, YouTube removed that one, too. And it’s not just pulling stuff from the big networks or clips that are available for sale on iTunes. In April, YouTube yanked a homemade video for Weezer’s “This Is Such a Pity,” which used footage from the 1984 break-dancing cult classic Breakin’.
“We’ve been really proactive and cooperative with the rights holders,” says Supan. “If we’re alerted and we have knowledge that there’s been videos uploaded that are unauthorized, we will remove them immediately. Because we’ve been so cooperative and so responsive, I think we’re in a really good position.”
They’ve taken other steps, too. In March they instituted a 10-minute limit on uploads, which will prevent users from uploading complete episodes of The Office or 24. (Independent, non-infringing content producers can sign up as “YouTube Directors,” which will allow them to eschew the time limit.) They’ve also developed more back-end technologies to simplify and automate the identification of infringing files, and to “fingerprint” removed videos so they can’t be uploaded again later.
YouTube is also taking an active role in educating its users, a large chunk of whom are young teenagers. “Uploading programming that’s on your hard drive but you don’t own is illegal,” says Supan. “They’re learning. They don’t realize that television isn’t free.”
All these steps, so far, have earned YouTube plaudits for being a “good corporate citizen” (as the Motion Picture Association of America recently called it). For all the talk of YouTube as a “Napster for video,” Supan is emphatic that the opposite is true. “Napster was a black market for illegal music-file swapping. We’re not a black market. And the biggest difference is that you can’t download anything on YouTube.”
Actually, that’s not exactly true. Already, several sites have sprung up that make downloading YouTube’s Flash clips to your hard drive as easy as copying, pasting, and right-clicking “Save As.” And other programs make it possible to convert those to iPod-ready formats. But with videos so easily and instantaneously available on the site, not everyone feels the need. “If there’s something really totally awesome that I want to have forever, yeah, I’ll go and download it,” says Beau. “But the older you get, you realize you don’t have to own it all.”
When I bring up the site’s marvelous appeal as a nostalgia repository, and I ask Supan if it’s only going after big fish like South Park and Brokeback Mountain (an entire version of which appeared on YouTube for a short time), looking to take down mainstream videos like that as soon as they’re up, she corrects me. “We’re not ‘going after’ any content on the site. We don’t control the content on our site. We’re just a service provider. It’s all posted at the discretion of the users.” And, she adds, “the reality is that it’s hard to say what’s uploaded by the content creator, the user, and what is not. And so therefore one can’t assume at this point.”
It’s a tacit admission that copyrighted material not only exists on the site, but it’s also a primary reason why so many viewers log on every day. But it’s also true that more and more mainstream content producers are catching on to YouTube — and are looking for ways to leverage its popularity by uploading content to it themselves.
When NBC yanked the “Lazy Sunday” clip, that was understandable, in a way. It was on sale for $1.99 on iTunes and available to watch on NBC.com (as long as you didn’t use Mac or Linux). But it was also, in the eyes of many observers, a big mistake. Saturday Night Live is a show that’s been accused more than once of being irrelevant, even moribund. Five million people watched that video, including young people, who may have never watched SNL before. For several weeks, it was a genuine cultural phenomenon. You really can’t buy advertising like that.
Contrast “Lazy Sunday” with another popular clip, the “real life” Simpsons intro, in which actors recreate the show’s opening-credits sequence. That was produced as an ad by the British network Sky One to hype its run of that season’s episodes. In order to get the same type of contagious buzz NBC tried to quash, Sky itself quietly leaked the clip to YouTube — and in short order it had more views than “Lazy Sunday.”
