YouTube porn and MySpace copyrighted material

YouTube and MySpace have experienced explosive growth and are now dealing with some of the problems.  User Generated Content (UGC) is very difficult to manage and control. I can tell you from personal experience at AltaVista and Napster that porn and copyrighted material (music) are two of the biggest issues to manage, but also the most popular with users.

UPDATE 8/1/2006: For some reason this post is the #2 result on Google for the query "Youtube porn". This post is obviously not about porn but hundreds of people click on it everyday. So, if you are looking for porn go to Pornotube.com , a new search engine for porn. Now, back to our discussion about the challenges of filtering out porn and copyrighted material.

YouTube and MySpace are the multi-media Napsters of 2006. They are experiencing the same explosive growth, the same scalability issues, and will face the same legal problems, and some new ones. These sites are typically started by young, inexperienced, technical people who are ill equipped to deal with legal, PR, and customer satisfaction issues.

Porn is everywhere on the Internet. It is not illegal, but web sites must comply with COPA to attempt to prevent minors from viewing the content. There are fairly simple ways to do this, but there are also simple ways for minors to get around it. Congress, concerned parents, and law enforcement are pushing for new and tougher controls. YouTube and MySpace need to deal with the porn issue quickly.

Copyrighted material (music, videos, books) is also a big issue for YouTube and MySpace. The laws are pretty clear here, but compliance on an Internet scale can be very difficult. Web site owners must use "commercially reasonable efforts" to remove copyrighted material from their sites. Individual users will post songs and videos with different titles and file names making it very difficult for the sites to screen it out. YouTube and MySpace need to post warnings to users about the laws against posting copyrighted material, screen out the obvious infractions, and comply with "take down" notices from copyright holders. UPDATE: I just wrote a seperate post focused on copyright law on the web. This is a widely misunderstood topic and deserves its own discussion.

Child predators are a new problem for YouTube and MySpace that we didn't have to deal with at AltaVista or Napster. The users of YouTube and MySpace and other social networking sites are mostly kids. They share all kinds of personal information (names, addresses, IM screen names, pictures, etc) that they probably shouldn't. This is the perfect environment for child predators posing as kids. This kind of stuff is extremely difficult to catch, and potentially very dangerous. It will only take a few tragedies to rally concerned parents, law enforcement, and congress to crack down on these social networking sites. Cnet reports today that the state of Massachusetts is already pushing "MySpace faces call to crack down on predators". The sites need to do something NOW before it becomes a bigger problem.

OK, three big problems to deal with. Then they have the backlash from indignant users to deal with. Read this post Screw YouTube from a user who had some content removed from his "account".  YouTube is trying to do the right thing here. They get complaints from copyright holders so they need to take down certain files. Users get angry with YouTube, and accept no personal responsibility. The users don't seem to understand that what they are doing is illegal.

YouTube and MySpace need to walk a fine line to comply with the law and social responsibility, while at the same time providing their users a great service with a "cool" edge. It would be pretty easy to mess this up, offend both sides, and end up with a PR nightmare. Handled properly they could have a huge success.

Hopefully the VCs involved will provide the experience, experts, and money needed to manage these issues. YouTube and MySpace could be grand slam home runs...or strike outs. How they handle these issues will ultimately determine their success.

Subscribe - To get an automatic feed of all future posts subscribe here, or to receive them via email go here and enter your email address in the box in the right column.

Comments

[Coolz0r]

I agree when YouTube says it refuses copyrighted content. I'm not against that. My archive on YouTube is a collection of ads, and nothing but ads. Commercials, so to say. There were a few SNL clips, which I took down myself, after YouTube alerted me.

Question is: when is it copyrighted?

All those nutty sing-along or karaoke clips that make the wave of user generated content so big, did those users pay to use the songs? No.

All those snippets from sitcoms (do a search on 3rd rock from the sun, or any other soap) do they contribute any value? No.

All those snippets from News broadcasts, accidents, sports roundups, best of's and worst of's, unique moments in touchdowns or dunks...

The list is long and endless. I didn't wrote the post because they removed one stupid clip, it's because they keep changing and updating the service, which either causes my blog to go in a loading loop (the clips don't appear, the loader bar is endlessly trying to reach the end) or makes the handling of my account impossible. The moment you actually have to browse your archive by URL hacking the address, things got to much for me. The usability is gone.

There's tons of features I never used, and if you bookmark clips, chances are the clip will be removed next time you want to see it. I've had playlists from clips of other users that listed 20 items, but when I wanted to see them, only 7 worked, the rest was removed.

No notices on takedowns because (quote YouTube:) that might make people want to keep uploading it again and again.

You think you have saved up for an archive of clips you like, but then when you go back in time to scroll it, you see clips that have been removed for 'inappropriate content' which were online for months, until some lame bored human decided it wasn't his/her taste and decided to flag the clip. Nobody knows how the flagging really works.

The problem is that YouTube doesn't seem to do that well in judging opinions of its users. YouTube became really popular, some clips have millions of hits, but then when you scroll their 'hall of fame', 75% of the most popular clips are violating copyrights.

YouTube measures with different weights, depending on how the outcome of the calculation is for them. They can go around at investors with high figures and lots of users and clicks, but if they really drew the line where it was supposed to be drawn, a lot of the community would be gone.

that's just my two cents though.

[Ricardo Conte]

There is one BIG problema with YouTube, one wich makes me not to go there anymore.

They show a sign "Share This Video" upon finishing an exhibition of a clip.

If you do that (I did) and send the video to a friend, that person receives an INVITATION TO JOIN, he must register with e-mail and password so as to see the video !

The YouTube message says: "You've received an invitation from (your login). Log in or sign up to accept it!" Very clever, isn't it ?

That is not fair. That is not good business. Very clever they are. Will not go there anymore. Will not recomend to friends. Will not speak about MySomething.

R. Conte

[Mark]

Youtube would be wise to host their servers somewhere that doesn't have to comply with US copyright law. That way all these people who are solely in to profit as much as they can wouldn't be able to bully them into forcing users to take down so much content. Everything is copywritten if its professionally produced and someone has financial interest in it. Its other people's greed that is going to kill youtube. Myspace is a fad that will die like disco.

[Don Dodge]

CoolzOr, OK I understand your frustration, and that of other users. YouTube is messing up by not being absolutely clear about the rules. They are probably making them up as they go along. Not uncommon for inexperienced entrepreneurs. I have been there myself.

It is important to have a clear understandable policy and stick to it. They need to communicate clearly. Users will understand and appreciate that. They will figure it out with enough time. Or, their VCs should be in their advising them. This is serious.

[Nate]

I beg to differ about myspace. With the Internet comes the emergence of new social playgrounds. The technology has enabled us to communicate more efficiently in so many ways. Myspace is capitalizing on this just as any succesful company does with a new idea.

[Mark]

Social playground or not it's numbers are starting to dwindle. Between its slow load times, server down times, and fickle clientele who have proven they have no problem dropping social fads I predict certain doom for myspace.

Youtube on the other hand has demonstrated the use of flash movies to make videos more readily available. If they can beat the copyright issues (which I think Don overestimates anyway) and clean up the res of the videos they could very well end up the nets premiere source for video files.

[Don Dodge]

Mark, I appreciate your comments but you really need to do your homework on these issues.

First, MySpace is one of the fastest growing applications on the Internet...ever. I was VP of Napster in the old days, and at that point Napster was the fastest growing web app in history.

Second, MySpace did over 2 BILLION page views last month, and they are growing, not dwindling. Believe me, I know the numbers. Will they fail or succeed in the long run? My bet is that they will succeed. At AltaVista I worked with Ross Levinsohn, now president of Fox Interactive, and current owner of MySpace. He is a smart guy and he has a lot of money behind him.

Lastly, on copyrights. Again from my days as VP of Napster I know a thing or two about copyrights. I am not over estimating their importance. In fact, you have convinced me I need to write a piece on copyright law on the web. It will be my next post.

[Mark]

Copyright in America right?

I believe the persistence of P2P speaks for itself. Sure you can turn around and continually ask youtube to take down copywritten material. But in the same breath someone else can upload it again. It turns into a full time job and the paperwork would be endless. Napster was a nice introduction but those mistakes were learned (granted the very hard way) and the whole gnutella network and resulting Kazaa garbage now seems so boring. Copyrights are as important as they can be enforced and unless youtube agrees to submit users IP's who upload the material the whole thing can be skirted with a disclaimer. Their VC investment isn't huge and they're relying on this exact type of activity. I just hopped on youtube moments ago was able to find a wealth of material that was definitely copwritten. Between that, rapidshare, megaupload, and keepvid it's a huge issue. I would love to read a post on copyright laws in the states and look forward to seeing your next one on it. Thanks in advance.

I stand by Myspace being a fad that will die. Maybe it will change but since it was bought out and the publicity has grown they now face the problem of peope using it simply as a marketing tool. Once that takes over completely and people stop trusting it I predict it will go the way of the online chat groups like Yahoo which is just littered with bots advertising porn. Sure there may have been more hits but how many of those are sincere use and how many are opportunists seeing a new way to infect with the now buzzed out 'viral marketing'? Never mind someone coming along with something better.;)

[Jane]

dificult probrems.

[email protected]