The buzzards are already gathering to watch YouTube be brought down.  Analysts at Forrester Research are the latest to predict that the web video phenomenon cannot survive the coming onslaught of copyright suits that will inevitably come.

It’s a movie we’ve seen before, and its title was “Napster”.  This new thriller, starring YouTube, is predicted to have an even more spectacular and tragic ending.  The bigger they are, after all…

The problem with YouTube, like Napster, is not anything inherent or evil in the design of the platform.  After all, the point was not that the designers of YouTube or Napster directly rip copyright holders off.  The point is, though, that both of these platforms enabled literally millions upon millions of copyright violations to be committed each day by their users…and the violations committed are obvious and blatant — scenes from TV shows, movies, and other copyrighted material abound.

And yes, YouTube is just the largest of a whole genre of video-sharing sites…including one from the company with extraordinarily deep pockets — Google.  Get your popcorn and pull up a seat.

We can (and many will) debate ad infinitum the merits of the copyright actions, which are already coming.  But for marketers, that’s not really the point.  It merely suggests that some of the emerging guerrilla tactics in video marketing may need to be redirected some day.

YouTube’s real significance, as described before in these posts, has been to enable and habituate a whole new generation of video viewers on the web.  At this time last year, people like me were asking, “Is web video ready for prime time?”  Now, we’re all talking about how to harness this new energy and habit pattern among web visitors of all ages.

After Napster, there was iTunes and Rhapsody and a handful of other legitimate platforms for sharing and distributing music.  The transition was orderly and incredibly rapid.

Will Brightcove and Maven and MediaSilo be the worthy successors to YouTube, or will self-publishing platforms like Google Video or even YouTube itself be able to figure out how to mollify copyright holders?  It will be interesting to watch, and if the history of the music industry is any lesson, it will be both quick and totally transformative to the community of content holders.