Does video have a Napster problem?
It was a heavy-metal drummer who provided the defining moment for the original Napster and peer-to-peer music networks. In May 2000, Lars Ulrich, the bombastic drummer for the band Metallica, personally delivered a list of 335,000 screen names of people suspected of music piracy to Napster’s Silicon Valley office. With that giant stack of names came the beginning of the end for freewheeling music exchange services. Fast-forward six years. The new threat in Internet-enabled copyright infringement is centering on video. YouTube, the most trafficked of the video-sharing sites, has recently been asked to pull three videos–two skits from NBC Universal’s “Saturday Night Live” and an American Airlines training bit–from its site owing to possible copyright violations. But what’s going on with YouTube, which promptly yanked the videos when NBC contacted it, pales in comparison to the growing legal concerns about video peer-to-peer networks. Increasingly, it’s looking like movie and television
