Thursday, Jan 15, 2009    Text size: 

This week, the Internet video-sharing giant has started to mute the audio on videos that use copyrighted music. The censored movies still display the video portion, with an alert underneath that reads, “This video contains an audio track that has not been authorized by all copyright holders. The audio has been disabled.”

Tech analyst Stan Schroeder said that the enforcement of such a rule would have widespread affects on YouTube users — even those who don't think they're violating any rules.

"The implications are a bit different than with removing copyrighted professionally produced content, like an official music video," he wrote for Mashable.com. "We’re talking about tens of thousands of fan made videos, funny spoofs, remixes and the like being pretty much destroyed, and I’m guessing users will be less than thrilled about it."

Adult producers and webmasters have been using YouTube to promote themselves almost since the site's inception, but because of YouTube's prohibition against adult content, industry professionals have had to post only non-explicit clips.

YouTube's new crackdown on copyrighted music comes on the heels of other crackdowns, including a tightening of standards against almost any kind of adult content that the YouTube brass instituted last December. All "sexually explicit" videos – a term that YouTube has not defined – will be removed from the most viewed page, the top favorited page and other prominent pages.