> Why haven't more video sites emerged with a similar ethos? Because if they touched commercial music or video at all (even by accident or if it's fair use), t

> Why haven't more video sites emerged with a similar ethos? Because if they touched commercial music or video at all (even by accident or if it's fair use), they'll be sued into oblivion and/or asked to implement the same level of "content protection" YouTube has today (effectively the same thing because a startup video site wouldn't have the resources for that). Remember, the only reason YouTube exists today in any sort of recognizable form is that they got together with Google's checkbook and Google's lawyers. That gave them the legal ammunition to force some kind of settlement (albeit a deeply flawed and problematic one, between ContentID and non-DMCA takedowns, among other things). If a YouTube competitor is going to emerge, it's going to come from a big company. That's not impossible, but most (all?) of the likely candidates would bring their own (similar or different) serious flaws to the table. And even then they'd need to develop a "content protection" scheme roughly as good as YouTube's - which would take serious machine learning chops on top of everything else, whittling the list even further.