Jason Calacanis recently wrote about how YouTube.com was building a business based on copyright infringement:

These type of companies are leeches. They know that their business is predicated on people stealing content and they hide behind this silly disclaimer that users agreed that they owned the content they submitted. Yeah, right… the dozens of Saturday Night Live clips on your site are owned by the people who submitted them. Sure… whatever.

Indeed, there are many examples on YouTube of copyrighted materials being posted. Lately, the most popular user-generated content on sites like YouTube belong to one of these categories:

- Pirated TV clips
Pirated TV ads (sometimes pushed by the ad agencies to drive viral marketing)
“America’s funniest videos” clips
lip-synching and dancing to famous songs.
’s clip:

But You Tube is not alone, as all user-generated content websites are struggling to find ways to flag and delete copyrighted material. Human-based editorial controls are not enough beyond a certain scale, specially when the users actually do want to see those videos in the site.

In the meantime, get ready for a few more MySpace and YouTube copyright or scared parents scandals.