The amount of copyrighted material on YouTube and other video sharing sites may be less than previously thought. A report from online video tracker Vidmeter found that of the top 6,725 videos between December 9, 2006 and March 22, 2007 only 621, or 9.23%, were removed because they were found to infringe upon their owners copyright.
The most popular YouTube videos were viewed 1,586,573,131 times in the studied time frame and pulled clips accounted for only 94,187,203 of those views, or 5.93%.
Of the videos "removed by owner" from YouTube, however, Viacom did have the largest share of content with about 40% - presumably boosted by its February 2 call for the Google owned video Website to pull 100,000 clips. The most popular Viacom video to be removed was Panic! At the Disco's I Write Sins Not Tragedies which had been viewed 6,869,218 times before it was pulled on February 3. Viacom has since filed a billion dollar lawsuit against YouTube for copyright infringements.
Behind Viacom was Time Warner whose content represented 22% of the removed videos.
Vidmeter came to its numbers by analyzing data pulled from YouTube's servers between 4 and 8 times a day. To concerns that pirated content still runs rampant on the video-sharing site, the study notes that "the reason blatantly pirated full-length clips are not relatively popular may be that such videos are more diligently removed and thus do not have enough time to accumulate a critical amount of views." So while it may be on the site, it is still a fraction of the video-giants most popular content.
