The New York Times has an interesting article about how Hollywood is dealing with YouTube. They seem to be resisting their usual urge to just demand everything be taken down and are looking for a middle road where they get paid for their copyright material. The studios seem to be aware that having clips online can create huge amounts of publicity for little or no outlay, but they still want a cut of any money made (and don’t forget the talent, they want some too, so expect lobbying by various guilds yet).
Also interesting is the point raised about mashups. While the studios do consider them unlawful use of their material, they seem to want to be as flexible as they can be without giving anything away. Fox, for example, is working on a policy that will address the issue of mashups in a way that those creating them can understand.
I’d have thought the people having the toughest time here is YouTube (and therefore Google), they can’t stop users loading copyright material realistically (unless checked by someone and that incurs huge delays, and with the amount uploaded they’d need a lot of people) so unless they can prove beyond doubt they can track every clip subject to copyright the studios will pull their support and sue the hell out of them. How they do it I have no idea, you can’t rely on the text descriptions uploaded with a film, someone could easily circumvent it, so either they do have people manually ‘tagging’ content as it is uploaded or shortly afterwards, or they have some very clever way of checking the video picture for something (not sure this is possible).
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