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There is no such thing as a free ride!

I have commented about YouTube before and that service continues to grow in popularity. Apparently, while YouTube has yet to generate much revenue, it online traffic continues to grow rapidly. According to comScore Media Metrix, YouTube attracted 133.5 million visitors worldwide in January, up from 9.5 million a year earlier. This is pretty impressive growth by any standard.

The service is now owned by Google and empowers users to share their own home videos online with relative ease. Of course the service has also been used by some users to publish copyrighted materials. This is clearly illegal and to some extent has been tolerated by the media industry as long as YouTube takes down any illegal footage which is discovered.

However the scale of this is quite remarkable. An article on Mercurynews.com states

“Last month, Viacom demanded that YouTube remove more than 100,000 unauthorized clips from its site, and since that time, the company has uncovered more than 50,000 additional unauthorized clips, Viacom spokesman Jeremy Zweig said.”

The outcome of this is that Viacom are now suing YouTube for $ 1 billion (interesting what we consider that Google bought YouTube for $ 1.76 billion last November).

Of course the thing that interests me is that fact this would not be an issue if people refused to use the service in this way. The YouTube service has all sorts of useful useful applications but once again we see abuse of the system hitting the headlines. Alas I fear that the convenience offered by YouTube to circumvent copyright will continue to win out in the end.

Perhaps, if we consider that YouTube does abuse the right of the copyright owners we should consider being very selective when viewing content there. The effect of denying the producers of ‘content’ their just return can only have a negative effect which may lead to an overall reduction in the quantity and quality of material being produced.

It will be interesting to see what the outcome of this legal action will be. I expect to see a an out of court settlement of some form.

I feel that it is the introduction of interactive multimedia that that is leading to the sort of performance problems that I have commented on elsewhere in this blog. I am of course referring to home broad band which continues to provide what I consider to be less than acceptable performance. A recent speed test at my daughters flat showed a slower download speed than the upload speed!!!! Not good. (there are times in the day now when we can achieve 6 Meg plus download speeds so I am convinced that we are seeing the effects of bandwidth contention)