This may well be the beginning. After complaints by a group of Japanese media companies YouTube has pulled 29,549 videos off the site.

The companies claim that television, music and movies were uploaded without the appropriate copyright permissions and therefore violate the copyright of the content. I am thinking Japanese cartoons here, there are (were) a lot on YouTube. Complete episodes in some instances.

Earlier this week Gruper and Bolt.com were sued by Universal. In these cases copyright violation is worth $150,000 (I presume US$). If that is similar to what might be expected from YouTube the cost could potentially be $4,432,350,000! (in this instance) So no surprise they pulled the video!

This demonstrates perfectly why the copyright issue with YouTube could spell it’s demise. Sad but true. Although YouTube is aiming to make deals with copyright holders to leave the material on YouTube in exchange for a cut of the revenue. Something tells me they may run out of enough revenue to keep them happy. Especially if this is the first takedown. How many videos do they host again?

This entry was posted on Friday, October 20th, 2006 at 11:49 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.