Defecting From YouTube
(CBS/AP)
Yesterday, blogger and longtime YouTuber Miel Vanopstal lost his cool in a post titled "Screw YouTube." Vanopstal complains that YouTube's recent upgrades have made the site significantly slower, and that new efforts to enforce copyright and delete otherwise questionable material strike him as arbitrary. He is particularly galled that a single alert notice from a "puritanically minded" fellow user can result in a video being deleted. "I've had it with these random rejections," he writes.YouTube users upload video content to the site from all over the Web, which others can watch for free. The problem, of course, is that some of this content is copyrighted and used without permission. For instance, after a CBS "Evening News" segment on Jason McElwain was posted on the site, CBS asked YouTube to remove it. And, because such content is particularly difficult to monitor, the segment appeared again on the site the next day. YouTube's efforts to address the problem have left some users none too thrilled. Writes The Browser:
A bitter Nathan Weinberg at InsideGoogle says that he was kicked off YouTube two months ago. Weinberg chronicles his dissatisfaction with the free (and reportedly money-losing) service, ultimately deciding that he has only one thing left to do: "Ruin YouTube" by systematically reporting all of the site's traffic-generating but copyright-violating videos. Microsoft's Don Dodge, who formerly worked at Napster, adds a been there, done that post to the fray, noting sagely: "User-generated content is very difficult to manage and control."YouTube's response to Don Dodge was, "Thanks, genius." Just kidding.