We’ve all heard about the lawsuit Viacom filed against Youtube for hosting their stuff online without their permission. Now I think I’ve got an idea that could make everyone happy.

We’ve all heard about the lawsuit
Viacom
filed against
Youtube
for hosting their stuff online without their permission. Now i think I’ve got an idea that could make everyone happy. I’ve listed three things we have to admit before i tell you the idea:

  1. We have to admit that people will continue uploading copyrighted content and there’s no way to stop them. It’s just impossible to sort through all of the videos and even if the guys at youtube somehow did it, there are plenty of other sites that will host them.
  2. Now we have to admit that youtube profiting from other peoples’ videos is wrong. Viacom, Fox, or any other company (even a homemade project) deserves to be paid for their work. It’s stealing money from the people who made the videos. Let’s face it, you’re not going to pay for an arctic monkeys music video from itunes when you can see it for free on youtube (I’m just as guilty as you are).
  3. Maybe people don’t want exposure. You know, it may sound crazy, but it’s still their right. Suppose someone wanted a small business and not some crazy internet phenomenon. Whether it can bring them more profit or not, it’s not our choice to decide.

Now that that’s out of the way, my proposed solution:

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Force Youtube to pay companies like Viacom based on how many hits their content gets. I realize this raises more questions like “How much should youtube pay per hit? Should companies like Viacom then be able to tell youtube how to advertise on its videos pages? And how does this solve the problem of people who just don’t want more exposure?”

Well, i thought about this for a while. Then i saw the “channels” page on Youtube which got me thinking “what if they had (for example) an NBC channel? Then NBC could control the ads on their own channel.” Other videos would remain the same but company channels would have different control of ads. The regular text ads could stay up and still benefit youtube, but during the video there would be NBC ads benefiting NBC. A win-win i think.

I still haven’t thought of anything to help people who don’t want exposure. I guess you could still report your videos to youtube that you don’t want up there, but that’s about all i can think of. Hopefully that won’t be much of a problem.

Note: While i was writing this article, I hadn’t heard of the
Youtube Partner Program. After looking into it, it sounds like a great idea. What they really need to do is expand on that idea and incorporate big time companies like Viacom (with their own channels like i talked about earlier). I think that would be the best solution and I’m glad Youtube at least took a step towards ending the conflict. We may see a world where all the world’s videos are on one site and no one is angry about it. Someday.