And I have a bridge in Brooklyn to sell you, too

Filed in archive Internet TV on April 7, 2007

A controversial report from online video tracker Vidmeter found that of the top 6,725 videos between December 9, 2006 and March 22, 2007 only 621, or 9.23%, were removed because they were found to infringe upon their owners copyright.

The most popular YouTube videos were viewed 1,586,573,131 times in the studied time frame and pulled clips accounted for only 94,187,203 of those views, or 5.93%.

You know what Mark Twain said about statistics. That famous quip immediately came to my mind when reading this lame report.

So let's see if we have this right, Vidmeter. Only 6% of popular YouTube video views were pirated clips. However, my guess is that a 'popular' clip is one that is short, funny, and original. Pirated material is difficult to satisfy all three of those.

According to Vidmeter, a clip is not considered 'pirated' if it was not asked to be taken down by its owner. Given how atrocious the process is to find a video on YouTube, I wonder how many smaller infringements went unanswered. Also, if a video clip is both pirated and destine to be popular, it likely will be ordered down by the rightful owner before it becomes hugely popular.

Finally, a pirated clip often is found many, many times on YouTube. So, the History of Dance (a great original clip) exists once at the site and every viewing of it counts towards its popularity stats. But, a Jon Stewart clip might have been hosted 20 times (before Viacom forced it down), each splitting the same video's popularity stats.