How different is YouTube from Napster ?

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Remember Napster - the hugely popular music sharing site which shot to fame when it allowed people to exchange music freely ? Although it was not user generated content UGC in the spirit of the word, it could definitely be used as a platform to share music that its users generated.

Fast forward a few years, you have a company which probably just search+replace of music with video in the Napster business plan (ok ok with a few more changes may be) and launched YouTube - for Google's sake I would love to be proved wrong ! Anyways, YouTube is where people post video's possibly a mix of what they have generated and what is copied from various sources others can view and download it freely.

Content owners like CBS, Viacom, Time Warner, NBC Universal, News Corp and others are getting worried again at this blatant violation of content legality. Google somehow has to ensure that the content owners are satisfied and kept happy to ensure success of the 100 Mn plus YouTube videos that get distributed.

With Google behind you its not easy for YouTube to go down the same way Napster did. Google has already paid $10 Mn dollars to music companies and is now looking at $100 Mn upfront payments video and film to get the rights to distribute their stuff for 2 years. This strategy might click but definitely worth watching how the drama unfolds in the coming weeks and months.