YouTube is probably the biggest media platform where its main day to day concern is copyright. As mentioned on the YouTube site “when a person creates an original work that is fixed in a physical medium, he or she automatically owns copyright to the work.” Have you ever clicked on a YouTube video ready to watch and then come face to face with this? I know it’s annoying as hell.
http://mashable.com/2012/08/03/embedding-video-copyright-infringement/
This is simply because the rules of someone’s contract have not been followed. This is often done by someone outing in a complaint and asked for this content to be removed. YouTube cannot determine the copyright ownership and if it receives a complete take down notice, they remove that content immediately. The most common form of copyright infringement seen on YouTube is the use of third party material such as music, images or extracts of written material that belongs to others. Under YouTube’s terms and conditions when you agree to them “you warrant to YouTube that you already have the necessary copyright clearances for any third party material you use in the material you submit.”
Although YouTube works to stop copyright infringement in 2007 Viacom filed a lawsuit against Google’s YouTube over “posting Viacom programmes on YouTube video service without permission.” The lawsuit led to arguments over the limits of federal laws aimed at copyright and the right for people to share any source of entertainment online. The lawsuit first filed was for 1 BILLION DOLLARS claiming that YouTube illegally broadcasted over 79,000 copyright videos. The settlement was finally settled this past week and the terms of the settlement are not known.
But what if YouTube decided that anything posted on their site became open content? Where others could reuse and alter someone’s content. Would people continue their use of YouTube? Probably not considering many creators of YouTube are making profits from their content, and if they are used and posted somewhere else, why watch it on its original page or by its original creator?
Natasha Nikoloska 
Copy right is a huge issue when it comes to youtube!! so many people have the ability to literally copy ideas themselves from their own bedrooms… its sort of controversial though, because the owners of the videos should know better, if they dont want it to be copied, put your vid on a site that isnt as easy to access? but i loved the post !