Mark Cuban took aim at Google and YouTube yesterday by challenging their claim that they fall into protection under the “Safe Harbor” act and their claim that they don’t have full control of all 60,000 videos uploaded per day.

Mark makes this accusation in is his blog post titled Gootube Terrorizes Copyright Owners by Withholding Filters.

Mark makes some valid points…

How does YouTube say they can’t screen all videos when they clearly have agreed to do this with any company that strikes a deal with them? Al a Viacom who has been in negotiations for quite some time now on this very issue with YouTube. It seems that YouTube’s ability to screen out copyrighted material is currently available, but has been limited to only companies that have created deals with them. Mark calls this Terrorizing copyright owners.

Mark also calls into question the statement from YouTube that says they don’t alter or view each video, yet each video is altered since it is changed into flash format by YouTube when the video is uploaded. Although this is probably just software that puts it into flash, what about porn? Mark then asks, where is all the porn on YouTube? If they aren’t screening each video then how come there isn’t any porn on YouTube? Mark even goes as far as to ask his readers to post porn on Google Video and YouTube and see how long it stays there and to post the results in his comments section.

Also, he makes a point that Google is profiting not only from copyrighted videos on YouTube, but also full length feature films on Google Video that are copyrighted, but surrounded with Google Ads.

I have to agree with Mark on this one. I really don’t see the difference between YouTube and the old Napster. I actually see Google Video and YouTube as being worse then napster was since they are blatently profiting off of other people’s copyrighted material without their consent.

It almost seems as if google and YouTube or GooTube as many call it have no plans to do anything about all the copyrighted material. It’s as if they plan to just bully everyone around. Pretty much saying that we’re so big that we can post anything we want on our site and we won’t do anything about complaints unless you work out a deal with us. This tactic may work with other big corporations, but leaves the small movie director or vocal artist pretty much screwed since it’s so tough to get that many video’s removed.

I like many others use all sorts of google, youtube, ifilm and others video to bring more readers to my site, but I also would be more than happy to make sure the artists are getting compensated for their work or I would be more than happy to take down the videos if I was ever asked by the original artist. I believe Google and these other companies need to agree to a middle ground to make sure the original artist is rewarded for their work.

Sharing ad revenue would be a start, but would need to be implemented to make sure only the original creator of the work is rewarded. I think this should be fairly easy since contributors could easily fill out a form to become an authorized uploader and once approved no one else could upload copies of those videos. Plus if a copy is discovered it could be easily reviewed by gootube and then removed. Once you’re caught uploading copyrighted materials more than 3 times you’re banned for good.

This is just an idea, but there are plenty of ways to make this work. Simply stating that you don’t control your content is absolutely ridiculous and should not be allowed to continue.

Here are some other interesting blog posts on this topic…

Cory Doctorow and BoingBoing outraged!

Viacom terrorizes YouTube with bullshit DMCA notices