Of course. Viacom is looking for a RIAA type payday. Like the previous poster said, they’re fishing. If they want to know how often a particular clip is viewed, there’s a view counter on each clip.
I seriously doubt any of their properties are viewed more than the private poster nonsense. The YouTube junkies I know are not looking for clips of M*A*S*H or What’s Happening. There’s a whole slew of independent director/editor types these viewers subscribe to.
“One thing is pretty much undisputed — there was a LOT of copyrighted material put on YouTube.”
Certainly is. And a diligent property holder will get YouTubes complete cooperation in removing that material, once brought to their attention.
Ah but Youtube clips have a piece of embedded hypertext that makes it easier to repost them on Myspace and elsewhere (like blogs).
And it isn’t just a url, the entire flash video can be viewed on this other page.
Millions of Myspace users embed the images. You may even abstain from the practice but “host” violating videos. All it takes is someone to post a youtube clip to your comments and “you” host it.
I think they are looking for the widest pool of users possible, not just Google’s Youtube.
It must really get Viacom’s goat that they were offered Myspace and turned it down because they didn’t see any way to make money with it. Newscorp ended up buying it. There is advertising all over the site now and the minimum age of users was dropped from 18+ to 13 or 14 I think.
So why not the poster only, why the viewers?