Reel Pop

Last month the spotlight was on France-based video-sharing site Dailymotion, which Forbes magazine noticed was a magnet for copyrighted videos. Forbes even pointed out how an entire secondary market of Web sites had grown around Dailymotion, sites which simply collated and pointed to the illicit clips.

But now it looks like Dailymotion is cleaning up its act. Several sites that collate copyrighted clips on Dailymotion, such as the Simpson's-centric allsimps.com, have shut down. And searching for several different types of copyrighted material on Dailymotion returns no results.

A quick scan of the tags page shows that most tags are French, and several formerly popular English tags have been removed. Heck, Dailymotion used to be a hotbed of salacious webcam videos too, but even those are gone.

Is Dailymotion running scared of copyright police? Could be. Dailymotion has been gaining visitors, and France (and Europe in general) has been a hotbed of copyright activity lately. Last month a French video producer sued Google Video in France to have his documentary removed. And French press association Agent France Presse sued Google this year for copyright infringement through Google News. Google was also sued by Louis Vuitton for showing ads for Vuitton rivals, and sued by French publisher La Martiniere for digitizing its books without permission.

While none of these lawsuits speak to the Dailymotion situation directly, they certainly suggest that France is quite the stickler for copyright law. If anybody has more info on the French legal system in this regard, hit me up on the e-mail.