uTube and the copyright law  

It's the copyright laws that are wrong not YouTube. Most libraries have been doing same thing against writers for hundreds of years, but since film & record companies have a lot more money than authors they'll try to buy the law of course.

Much of the content at YouTube and other big video sites are either completely new or uploaded by tv-companies etc, so YT is hardly a problem. After all, if they show scenes from movies, that is also a good ad for those movies - unless it's a crappy movie. :D

The main problem is all the filesharing sites - we won't get many new computer programs, music, films etc if it's impossible to make a living on making it. But it's hard to see a solution that will make everybody happy. My hunch is that a reasonable compromise would be to:

1) lower the profit the industry can take per item. Cds & dvds are cheap to massproduce so why should the prices be higher than the vinyls used to be?

2) take a proportional fee from the Internet Providers (who are among the very few that make money on the net) and distribute it according to the number of downloads at the filesharing networks.

There should probably be a 3) and a 4) too, but at the moment I haven't any good ideas...

Youtube should be help responsible for copywrite laws to some extent. It would be idea if they could screen all of the videos that flowed through youtube every day. However, the fact of the matter is- that is nearly impossible. No one can watch 100,000 ten minute clips unless you had a monster of employees. People should take into consideration the kind of trouble that they, themselves, can get into. I see things on youtube that are copywritten all the time, and there is a button on the youtube website which allows you to report the video. So basically, it is everyones responsibility to stop copywritten material leaking on the internet.

Well utube doesn't get punished because they can't control what people are going to upload, but they should me more strict on what they can accept for the web as some things violate copyright laws, so to answer your question, utube should be responsible only if they don't remove the video after a certain amount of time