Stan Beer
Wednesday, 04 October 2006 20:39
Opinion and Analysis
Page 1 of 2
According to Forrester analyst Josh Bernoff, YouTube is going down. Bernoff believes YouTube is going to be sued to death because of copyright violations like the original Napster was. However, in my view the comparison with Napster is neither fair nor correct.
Reading Bernoff's
blog
on this subject was quite interesting because he invited readers to
comment on his views and of six comments, five disagreed with him, all
raising plausible arguments and most pointing to differences between
YouTube and Napster. This prompted a mildly irritated Bernoff to lodge
his own post admonishing the posters who disagreed with his views for
indulging in "soft-headed thinking".
It must be a wonderful feeling to have a monopoly on the correct way to think!
As more than one poster to Bernoff's blog pointed out, the original
Napster and today's YouTube are very different animals. Napster was set
up for one purpose only - to illegally share music files that were
subject to copyright. The only content of value on the site were music
tracks from popular recording artists. There was nobody posting
original content and nobody looking for original copyright free content.
Of course Napster was sued and shut down and of course it failed when
it reopened with copyright free material. Most internet users had
dial-up connections and nobody was interested in waiting 15 to 30
minutes to download an unknown track from an artist they'd never heard
of.
YouTube, on the other hand was set up for users to post home-made
videos. The most popular videos make it to the home page. The first two
videos I saw was one of an unknown jazz-rock fusion guitarist from
Russia displaying a couple of minutes of dazzling mind boggling
fretwork and another of a cute young Australian girl doing a funky
rap.
