British Prime Minister Tony Blair is utilizing YouTube to congratulate the new French president, Nicolas Sarkozy. Pretty cool.
And in French!
It will be interesting as politicians increasingly use YouTube and other web tools to communicate directly to their constituents, bypassing the traditional media completely.
tags: politics, video, youtube
Posted by Doug | No Comments »
This evening I was reading the Grooveshark blog and noticed a post about the amount of legal/illegal content on YouTube. So, I left a comment there and on the Techdirt blog. They both cited a study from Vidmeter which concluded that about 10% of YouTube videos violate copyright and about 6% of “video views” are from infringing videos.
From the Vidmeter study (PDF):
From the research performed, we have concluded that unauthorized copyright videos make up a relatively small portion of YouTube’s most popular videos and an even smaller portion of views to YouTube’s most popular videos.
And now, my response, as I commented on the aforementioned blogs:
— — —
It is especially interesting to note that only 6% of video views were attributed to infringing content.
However, I think the study has a huge methodological problem:
…they only count videos that have been successfully taken down as infringing, rather than actually looking at the content to see what’s infringing and what’s not.
In other words, if Universal Music didn’t issue a take-down notice for unauthorized copies of the U2 - Vertigo music video, then they were all counted as “legal.”
This line of reasoning is somewhat akin to the classic logical fallacy argument from ignorance, or argumentum ad ignorantiam.
No one saw X, so X has not happened.
No one issued a take-down notice that X is infringing content, so X content will not be considered infringing.
I just don’t find this line of reasoning very convincing. I think that a more comprehensive study, using extensive copyright review and sound statistical sampling, would be a welcome addition to the “YouTube is a pirates cove/YouTube is all about user generated content” debate.
Posted by Doug | No Comments »