This is a mess for at least three reasons:
1) There’s not yet a business model
2) There are major copyright issues that could eliminate much of the content on YouTube.
3) The rest of the stuff (submitted by copyright owners) is based on volunteer workers who make no money. Now there are places to distribute your content AND get some of the advertising revenue (Revver/Metacafe). The creators will follow the money, the viewers will follow the creators, and the advertising will follow the viewers eyeballs.

Your comments are bang on–just another sign of old media writhing in its death throes, wallowing in its own detritus. Now if the folks at FM can ever respond to emails, perhaps you will have a better model for the future.

Problem?! Maybe, but it also might be considered *Revolutionary tipping point of global significance in the history of communication*

Six one way, half a dozen the other I guess.

I don’t really follow you here John. I agree with you and Bob Dylan that “The Times They are a Changin’”, and that “The Time Warner’s they are NOT a changin’”. However I don’t see how bringing out the legal beasts will hurt Time Warner. Frankly, I think they just want Google to throw money at them. As the Napster buyout proved all this has little to do with “rights”, it’s a money grab.

YOU LACK ALL KNOWLEDGE OF BUSINESS AND LAW.

the problem with web 2.0 is that any idiot can put up a blog and pretend they know something. what a waste of 5 minutes of my life.

I just got finished listening to a recent IT Conversations podcast, a session from the 2005 Web 2.0 conference entitled “What Teens Want”. In fact, I think you (John) introduced the session. (I wasn’t there myself, so apologies to all for whom this is old hat.)

And the takeaway from the interview with these five teenagers was that the two things they wanted from people building next gen services was (1) “more free stuff”, and (2) fewer ads. Ads were really starting to piss some of these teens off. And all but one girl (if I remember correctly) had not paid for a single piece of media online. The one girl who had paid had only bought 10 iTunes songs, and had 1490 other copied/downloaded ones. Every other kid either ripped tunes from their friends or used bittorrent.

So YouTube came along and gave them more free stuff. They got half of what they want. But is Google now going to come along and give them fewer ads? I don’t think so. And you think that is going to endear Google to these kids? When they see “Ads by Gooooooooogle” at the beginning of each video clip? The kids don’t care about the brand. They just want free stuff.

Copyright itself is basically good, but using it to bash people is not. And DRM is particularly, insidiously evil, and it needs to die. But you don’t combat DRM and copyright abuses by throwing up massive-scale YouTubian piracy, setting a block on your shoulder, and saying, “so sue me!” Escalation is not the solution.

(Funny thing is, I’ve spoken with high-ranking insiders at Google over the years about this copyright issue, and what is happening now completely contradicts everything they’ve told me. I’m really amazed by this complete about-face that we’re seeing right now. I really wonder what sort of internal discussions Google has been having lately, if everyone is in agreement or if there is a lot of debate right now about this whole move.)