YouTube co-founder Chad Hurley delivered a speech at MIPCOM aimed at alleviating distributors’ fears over online distribution. It’s mostly not very interesting, however, the rights management portion caught my attention:

Hundreds of millions of people around the world were able to engage and experience the Olympics online, many of whom never had never had the opportunity to see the Games on their televisions. All of this took place while NBC, the broadcaster that owned the rights to the Olympics in the US, effectively used our Video ID technology to monitor and quickly block copyrighted Olympic content uploaded to the site.

Later, he expands on the details of this technology:

From the very beginning, we’ve been committed to working with content owners to make sure YouTube remains a platform for distribution, not unauthorized uploads. In fact, over 300 media companies, including NBC, RAI, Formula One, the Olympics and Lionsgate are using innovative products like YouTube’s Video Identification tool to better manage their presence on our site. Along with the other tools in our Content management system, Video ID helps content owners decide whether to block, promote, or even generate revenue from their content. Read the entire speech on TechCruch>>

This kind of technology puts control into the corporate hands to decide what you can and cannot upload. I’m thinking that whether or not a content producer has a fair use claim for something they want to show, it could be pulled by a corporate cog because it contains their material. There is no judgement involved. There are a couple of interesting pieces from The Center for Social Media on this issue, A Case of Selective Censorship and Unauthorized: The Copyright Conundrum in Participatory Video.