AOL Money & Finance:
A lot of people watch YouTube videos at work. A few are actually paid to do it.
A former bartender named Joe Bersik sits in front of a flat-screen monitor about 8 hours a day, pulling up Internet videos. His job is to find pirated material and get it taken off the Web.
Mr. Bersik works at BayTSP Inc., an eight-year-old start-up with big clients like Viacom Inc., the parent of MTV Networks. BayTSP employs more than 20 video analysts - sometimes called ‘hashers’ - who watch videos looking for copyright violations.
Tethered to his computer by headphones, Mr. Bersik on a recent day played the music video of R&B singer Akon’s hit song ‘Don’t Matter’ on YouTube. The logo of the MTV Jams TV channel was visible at the bottom of the clip. The 53-year-old Mr. Bersik watched for a minute then fired an alert to a colleague who sent an email requesting that YouTube take it down.
In about 2 hours, the video was gone.
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Mr. Bersik and the 8 men around him staring at monitors are playing a cat-and-mouse game with the people who post copyrighted clips on the Web. Working from a leafy office park on the fringes of Silicon Valley, they are key players in the legal battle over Internet copyrights between Viacom and Google Inc., which now owns YouTube.
Viacom last fall asked BayTSP to keep a running log of clips from the cartoon show ‘South Park’ and other Viacom programs that people had posted on YouTube. Read on.
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