• Reuters, Friday, April 6, 2007 11:30 AM

A controversial new report from online video tracking firm Vidmeter.com says that a paltry 6 percent of YouTube viewers consumed pirated clips pulled off the video-sharing site. However, the study only counted videos removed as unauthorized content and not the countless others, many of which are duplicates that escaped detection. A flawed study, but the report's authors seemed confident that unauthorized copyright videos make up a relatively small portion of YouTube's most popular videos and an even smaller portion of views.

Viacom spokesperson disputed the findings: "The Vidmeter study undercounts the volume of copyrighted content on YouTube by a significant margin." Stolen content on YouTube can show up in several different clips. Since there are so many versions of the same thing, and since only those clips flagged by media companies are removed (as per the Digital Millennium Copyright Act), it's impossible to tell how many YouTube users have consumed pirated material by only checking removed content.

For example, clips of "South Park," a Viacom-owned television program, still appear on YouTube despite the company's mandate that all its content be taken down. Added the Viacom spokesperson: "YouTube's site is designed in ways that make it impossible for rights holders to locate all of their copyrighted content, so even a robust take down notice program will miss significant amounts of copyrighted material."

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