• The New York Times, Friday, September 3, 2010 12:45 PM

Every week, consumers view some two billion ad-supported videos on YouTube, and, according to The New York Times, a third of them are uploaded without the copyright owner's permission but left up by the owner's choice. "They are automatically recognized by YouTube, using a system called Content ID," writes The Times. Rather than kill the video, however, an increasing number of content owners have "decided to leave clips like this up, and in return, YouTube runs ads with the video and splits the revenue."

As The Times notes, YouTube's new profitable relationship with content creators was not always so easy ... For a long time, YouTube executives spent their time across conference tables with lawyers worried about copyright violations." Indeed, "It was 90 percent lawyers in a meeting and the marketing people faded into the background," Chris Maxcy, YouTube's director of content partnerships, tells The Times. "Now the partners we are working with get checks that get bigger every month. And now when you walk into a meeting there's almost no lawyers."

Read the whole story at The New York Times »