YouTube Founders Interviewed

An anonymous reader writes: "FORTUNE's Adam Lashinsky interviews co-founders Steve Chen and Chad Hurley. 'In just five months, YouTube has gone from beta testing to part of the national zeitgeist. The website is a place where anyone with a home video can post it online and create an endlessly entertaining diversion for bored office workers -- who've been watching 40 million clips a day.'"

Re:Fluff

[flooey]

What I'd like to have seen asked is how they plan to deal with copyright infringement on the site with the vast amounts of content which they host. Both technical and legal answers would be interesting, I think.

From what I most recently heard, they use a basic system where a copyright owner can object to a particular movie, and it's manually taken down by someone on their team. When a movie is taken down, their system also fingerprints the movie and automatically rejects any further submissions of movies with the same fingerprint.

Re:What is the cost?

[Anonymous Coward]

They're funded by venture capital just like a 1990s dot com.

Re:Fluff

[apflwr3]

From what I most recently heard, they use a basic system where a copyright owner can object to a particular movie, and it's manually taken down by someone on their team. When a movie is taken down, their system also fingerprints the movie and automatically rejects any further submissions of movies with the same fingerprint.

If this is the case I can't imagine this system will last-- it's certainly not the copyright holder's responsibility to cruise YouTube to make sure no one is appropriating their works, and sooner or later an irate infringee will not be happy with a simple "sorry, we'll take it down" and sue for damages (I would imagine an example could be a scene from a movie still in production.)

Re:I'm surprised YouTube works

[Anonymous Coward]

yes because most people want to spend the time to burn dvd's of strange japanese tv shows or koreans playing starcraft.

the site is popular BECAUSE it uses flash which allows for easy watching of short clips that would not be worth the time to download and play with a local decoding solution.

Re:YouTube and Linux Support

[Eideewt]

Google video works under Linux now. As far as I know, it always has.

Re:Fluff

[flooey]

If this is the case I can't imagine this system will last-- it's certainly not the copyright holder's responsibility to cruise YouTube to make sure no one is appropriating their works, and sooner or later an irate infringee will not be happy with a simple "sorry, we'll take it down" and sue for damages (I would imagine an example could be a scene from a movie still in production.)

Actually, according to 17 USC 512 (c) [cornell.edu], it is in fact the copyright holder's responsibility. Copyright law has a special section regarding systems that allow users to upload content and spells out exactly how the system operators need to deal with it.

Google in fact has better support

[SmallFurryCreature]

Both use flash (wich opera has a problem with at the moment at least under linux, something to do with how flash requests the video) but google also allows you to download the file in several formats.

So you can play it in a decent player with some filters to make it look good. The difference in quality (at least on linux) is staggering.

Youtube has the tagging wich makes it easier to find stuff.

Re:Thank you!!!

[Achromatic1978]

Yeah, because that's a sustainable business model! No income! Burn a million a month in traffic costs!

Honestly, how long do you expect no ads to carry on for? Three months time there'll be ads in front of videos, or memberships required to upload or get video of greater than a pathetic bitrate.