Is Youtube Becoming the New Napster?

By Nickolas Weingartner on 06/02/2009

What's a music video without music? Well, just visit YouTube and you'll find out soon enough.

Masses of music videos, both fan-made and legitimate, have recently been exiled from YouTube, due to a step up in copyright infringement laws. They have either been taken down entirely, or strangely muted, leaving only a silent slideshow of pictures or people dancing to an invisible beat.

Copyright issues are nothing new to YouTube. Since the website's inception in 2005, it's been under heavy criticism on the issue. It hasn't been only with the music community either; the site hosts plenty of clips of copyrighted material from both the television and film industries. Countries like China and Morocco have even banned the site entirely.

YouTube has seen it's fair share of court cases on the issue as well. In 2008, Viacom won a case that required YouTube to give over information about each of it's users and their viewing habits, insisting that it was necessary to protect the company from copyright infringement. In 2009, YouTube instated a "Video ID" system after claims from the Warner Music Group. The system searched the site for copyrighted music, which lead to many videos being taken down or muted. 

In the strength of these rulings, music companies now putting in claims for everything from slideshows made to Dylan's "A Hard Rains A-Gonna Fall" to music videos made and sponsored by the labels themselves, and because of this music is slowly disappearing from the site and it seems that other forms of media are soon to follow.

What does this mean for the user? It means what was once a user-based site is slowly becoming one that is company controlled. While YouTube was once a marvel of the internet that gave power to the common user and a platform for them to speak on, it is slowly becoming overrun with companies who not only wish to control the media presented on it, but also plague it with advertisements in hopes of turning it into just another outlet for sales.
Many studios are making deals with the now Google-owned website, allowing them to show feature films and TV shows with advertisements interspersed in them. This combined with the Viacom-ruling makes YouTube the perfect place for corporate take over - a marketplace where you can access the specific viewing habits of each user and cater to each of them.

Comparisons to Napster, anyone?

Perhaps YouTube is becoming Napster, which is now controlled by the companies in which it once infringed upon and is used only as an outlet for companies to further promote their products.

But when Napster fell, it opened up Pandora's Box and out came a plethora of file-sharing communities. If YouTube continues down the path of media control in which it is heading, it may lead to the users doing the same - staging a coup d'etat and taking back the control which is now fleeting from them.

[Additional Photos: "Youtube", Youtube, 2009; "Napster", Napster, 2009]