YouTube's Perfect Ten

Just wanted to bring you a quick update on the continuing YouTube saga.

As you may recall, CBS was not too happy when someone posted Steve Hartman's "Evening News" story about an autistic basketball player on YouTube, and it asked YouTube to remove that and other copyrighted CBS material from the site. YouTube has complied, but the company is in a difficult position, because it's the users who post the videos that appear on its site -- not YouTube employees. It appears that the only way for YouTube to make sure copyrighted material isn't uploaded is to review all videos before they're posted, a time consuming and labor intensive task. (Just ask Craigslist.)

Well, this week YouTube announced a partial solution on its blog: A 10 minute limit for video uploads. "…if you've followed our blog postings or any of the press articles, you know we're constantly trying to balance the rights of copyright owners with the rights of our users," writes blogger Maryrose. "We did some analysis of the videos in our system over 10 minutes in length, and we found the overwhelming majority of them were full length, copyrighted videos from tv shows and movies."

This is not going to solve the problem, of course – the Steve Hartman story was less than 10 minutes, as was the "Lazy Sunday" clip that caused so much consternation over at NBC – but it will prevent some copyrighted content from being uploaded. Still, the move looks more like a band-aid than a real solution. Should be interesting to watch where things go from here.