What we might lose from YouTube to GooTube

The YouTube party might just be over.

For about a year we have enjoyed the weird and terribly fun video culture it offers. The ease with which people could post, watch, embed and link to videos created a phenomenon that certainly ranks among the top Internet experiences of all time

YouTube was more fun than chat, more creative than Napster, and more energized than just about any Web-based application out there.

YouTube was a rare site that captures so much of what the Web promised to be: a seemingly ungoverned buzzing space that offered glimpses of the strange and familiar. You could catch the hilarious Daily Show segment that spoofed MySpace (and me) or French superstar Zinedine Zidane headbutting his opponent in the World Cup final.

It never came close to fulfilling the heavy promises of the Web: universal knowledge and democratic culture. But it sure was a blast.

I use the past tense because I suspect that we will look back on the heady days of anything-goes-user-generated content with much nostalgia.

That does not mean that YouTube will change radically over night. Nor does it mean that YouTube will cease to be the major site of user-posted-and-created video clips. It just is unlikely to be quite as noisy and silly.

Already, YouTube aficionados are posting tributes to the cultish video clips that the service seems to be removing at a record pace. Some reports indicate that YouTube removed more than 30,000 clips at the request of a Japanese media group.

It’s not that YouTube now must behave like a grownup company. It’s more that YouTube is becoming the central battlefield in the next great struggle to define the terms and norms of digital communication. So it’s retrenching in preparation for that battle.

And every week that “GooTube” grows in cultural and political importance, the more stories we hear of important video clips coming down.

It’s understandable when YouTube removes a clip after a music or film company sends a “notice-and-takedown letter” to YouTube complaining that a user-posted video contains its copyrighted material and thus possibly infringes. But when the company zap clips simply because of their political content, that’s a different problem.

Here is an example in which copyright acts as an instrument of political censorship: U.S. Rep. Heather Wilson (R-New Mexico) is running for re-election in a close race this fall. Back in the mid-1990s she chaired the New Mexico Department of Children, Youth, and Families.

Problem was, her husband was being investigated about accusations that he had been sexually involved with a minor. So, one of the first things she did as head of the department was remove his file. Now everyone in New Mexico is finding out about it. A blog called Democracy for New Mexico posted on YouTube a news clip of Wilson and others discussing the cover-up.

But New Mexico voters could not view the clip for long: The TV station invoked the "notice and takedown" provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act to kill the video clip.

Of course, any one of my students would be able to tell you at length why posting a news clip of a public official who is under scrutiny and up for re-election would be fair use – an allowable use of copyrighted material for the purpose of news and commentary. But when it comes to the Web, the copyright act has no respect for fair use. Neither does YouTube, apparently. The clip came down.

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