BBC News reports that YouTube is now serving up 100 million video clips per day. That’s three billion — billion! — videos per month. Imagine the bandwidth cost.

I can’t help but wonder, though, how long it will take before the dirty little secret of YouTube hits mainstream media, that being the fact that copyright violations are one of the main engines driving the site.

“The Ultimate Zidane HeatButt Video” is one of this week’s top-viewed videos (over 350,000 views as I type this). If the person posting the clip can’t spell “headbutt” properly, I doubt he or she has permissions from the owners of the World Cup telecast, Conan O’Brien, Butterfinger, George Lucas, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Nintendo (among others) to use their copyrighted material in the clip.

Frankly, a lot of what I like about YouTube is material that’s a blatant copyright violation: I can see a clip from Spamalot (15,114 views), watch 1976-vintage Springsteen perform “Thunder Road” (9,146 views) and even see a Team America puppet barf all over a Disney parade (3,934 views).

Mashups and bootlegs and re-edits (oh, my!) are what make YouTube most interesting. They’re also, in many cases, blatant infringements of copyright.

Do the copyright owners know? Do they care? Should they? Does the fact that “Ask Zen: Copyright & YouTube” has fewer views than a puppet barfing on Disney characters (it’s at 3,057 as I write this) have any significance?

JULY 19 UPDATE: Just hours after I posted this, ZDNet posted this story about YouTube being sued … for copyright infringement.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 19th, 2006 at 8:09 am and is filed under Internet Stuff.