Continuing with the topic of fair use, I would like to point you to a video by Margaret Stewart, YouTube’s head of “user experience” who spoke to a TED audience.  She provides a (very general) look behind the curtain of how YouTube identifies matches between original material and videos that duplicate (or contain portions of) copyrighted originals.  What happens next depends on what restrictions the content owner has set for their work.

What’s impressive is the massive amount of information that YouTube handles daily.  It’s not just a few videos of people’s weddings or pets being uploaded, it’s the equivalent of 100 years of video being added each day….and being compared to millions of reference files.  It’s understandably an automated process, which leads to some mismatches and user complaints (you’ll get a feel for this by reading the comments to this video).

YouTube clearly strives to protect content owners, but also recognizes the value of content creators allowing the use of their work by others…in mashups, etc.  Stewart provides an example of how a content owner allowed the reuse of their work by a fan and later by a couple in their wedding video.  The wedding video went viral, getting over 40 million hits, which prompted renewed downloads of the original work from iTunes.  The lesson being that by allowing others to use their work, the original content owners benefited from the added exposure.

Anyway, here’s the TED talk: