From one of the blogs I read, one of the better dialogs about the Mark Cuban comments on YouTube and its copyright liability.

Don Dodge on The Next Big Thing: Mark Cuban loves YouTube

I find the comments to this post almost more interesting than the blog post itself.

To me, the issue of all the major intellectual property legal concepts: copyright, trademark, and patent face considerable challenges from the rapid advance in technology.  It’s only getting murkier.

This is one of the situations that you wish Congress would get involved in to make things clear without years of legal maneuvers, but of course, the last time they tried that we got the DMCA.

Mark has a strong point here about the significant amount of infringing content that YouTube has on its site.  It probably would not be hard to evaluate, based on community rank and views, which “type” of content is driving most of YouTube’s traffic – clean or dirty.  Since any homemade video with a song snippet or video snippet from professional sources is dirty, I’m guessing that this type of analysis would not bode well for an argument that YouTube is primarily for clean content.

At the same time, YouTube is not Napster, and YouTube is not Betamax.  It’s something new, and as usual, it will likely be 2010 before our legal system sorts it out.  In the meantime, something even more innovative and challenging to traditional definitions of intellectual property will come into existence…

Just wait until we get that Star Trek replicator technology going…