aTypical Joe: a gay New Yorker living in the rural South

Saturday, September 30, 2006

YouTube’s no Napster

Mark Cuban’s YouTube-is-just-another-Napster road show has made mention in the Times today. I was happy to see Thomas Hawk point to Don Dodge’s argument that Cuban is wrong on the merits:

Mark said YouTube will be "sued into oblivion", and isn’t worth anything. He is wrong, but it does make for a lively conference speech, and good headlines. I was a VP at Napster when we were being sued by the record labels, so I know a little about copyright infringement. YouTube has "significant non-infringing use" which is a proven legal defense against copyright lawsuits. The Sony BetaMax case was won on the basis that video recorders were used for many other legal purposes that demonstrated significant non-infringing use. Sony could not be held liable for the misdeeds of some of its users. It is the responsibility of the copyright owner to identify infringing material and take action to protect it.

I’m not so confident as Don about that “proven legal defense.” Part of me fears that the Grokster decision was just a rest stop for the court on the road to overturning the Betamax decision. But I am profoundly optimistic that one way or another the copyright cartel that has only taken on its potency in recent decades cannot be sustained. These guys or their successor corporations are going to see that it is in their economic interest to do it differently.

I thought Cuban would be among the first; instead it looks to me like he can’t see the forest for the trees:

What is it about youtube.com that has made it so successful so quickly? Is it the amazing quality of user generated content ? Is it a broadband fueled obsession with watching short videos?

No & No.

I don’t know what percentage of YouTube content is user generated, but to dismiss it so blithely is to miss something big. Downloading a song from Napster was never you and me sharing the way YouTube is just exactly that. MySpace gets all the credit but email and embedding is the kind sharing that everyone wants and the reason for YouTube’s meteoric rise. If the court - or some corporate deal - shuts that down, those users will be very angry.

Just like with the VCR they fought so viciously (anyone remember Jack Valenti’s “the VCR is to the American film producer and the American public as the Boston strangler is to the woman home alone."), they’ll make money from users using that copyrighted content in their remixes.

Cuban sees the Warner deal as Bertelsman and Napster and says it’s too complex and their are too many parties involved. I like to think it might work. I’ve been dreaming of micro-payments since, well, since I signed up for AdSense.

Google had no business model and was unprofitable for how long? Theirs became the model that revolutionized web advertising. Me, I want YouTube’s - whatever it may turn out to be - to be the next revolution. I’m guessing the time is right and Cuban is wrong.

P.S. - Mark has nothing against YouTube.