YouTube Adds 10-Minute Video Limit
Popular viral video site YouTube.com earlier this week made some moves to ensure that copyrighted material was not making it on to its site. Effective immediately, the length of videos would be limited to ten minutes or less. In an analysis by the company, it said a majority of those longer videos were copyrighted.
"We're constantly trying to balance the rights of copyright owners with the rights of our users," the company said in a statement.
YouTube has drawn the ire of the broadcast networks, most recently NBC. Representatives of the network found copies of "Lazy Sunday," a rap parody by Saturday Night Live comedians Chris Parnell and Andy Samberg, on YouTube's pages and demanded they be removed.
Sifting through the content submitted by users is no easy task. Each day, tens of thousands of new videos are submitted to the site. Thus, the service also relies on self-policing by its users, who view some 15 million videos per day and are asked to report those with questionable content.
In a posting to the company's Web log, YouTube said it was aware that for some users, the ten-minute restriction would be an issue. The company is working on a solution, but for the time being it asked those who had legal-long form content to contact the service directly.
"We want to know how you've been impacted by this change and any thoughts or ideas you may have," YouTube said.