Beyond the outright movie/album piracy, there's another phenomenon that happens constantly at Youtube:

1. Someone uploads funny/interesting content.

2. Other people (bots maybe) notice that it's popular and download and re-upload it, titling and promoting it so that it ranks above the original in search results. Often the re-uploaders file takedown notices against the original video or other re-uploaders, so they're removed.

3. Repeat step 2 hundreds of times, until any search for "funny/interesting content" returns only a series of almost-identical 240p 15fps cropped, mirrored, or otherwise unwatchable versions of the original video.

I don't know if they condone this because it results in more overall views, or if they're just terrible at fighting it, but it's largely made Youtube useless for its original purpose as a many-to-many video sharing platform.

Hey CommieBobDole, that's exactly the problem we are solving. Our technology is robust enough to detect all those tweaks.

It's hardly unspoken, Viacom sued them for a billion dollars way back before Google bought them. They only lost the case because they couldn't find evidence that YouTube execs mentioned any specific video when discussing the money they made from piracy.

They fact that they included videos they had specifically authorised or uploaded themselves in the list of supposedly infringing videos couldn't have helped.

One correction: Google bought YouTube in 2006. Viacom sued YouTube in 2007.

I guess that makes more sense, since YouTube wouldn't have had $1B to sue for. But the actions brought up in the trial were pre-acquisition.