BOB GARFIELD: This is On the Media. I'm Bob Garfield.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: And I'm Brooke Gladstone. Late last week, at the request of Comedy Central, YouTube began purging clips from The Daily Show, The Colbert Report and South Park. It appeared to be the first step in what was widely seen as the biggest pitfall in Google's purchase of YouTube last month. Many predicted that as soon as YouTube had any cash, content providers would begin to sue. But Columbia Law School professor Tim Wu wrote on Slate.com this week about another possibility- that both Comedy Central and YouTube are playing by a new set of rules that is allowing YouTube to create a whole new kind of copyright. He joins us now. Tim, welcome back to the show.

TIM WU: Thank you very much.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: So in your Slate piece, you quote from, and later rebut, The New York Times reference to YouTube, as, quote, "a litigation-laden landmine." And the prediction that it would go the way of Napster and be crushed under the weight of copyright infringement lawsuits- you say no way that's going to happen.

TIM WU: I think that YouTube is in a different legal position than companies like Napster, companies that were really straightforward pirate sites. YouTube, first of all, was born of a different lineage. It was born kind of a place for stupid human tricks. [BROOKE LAUGHS] And it's always had a lot of legitimate content- if you call legitimate content really bad karaoke- not illegal content. It's also had the advantage of being, from the beginning, under a much more protective legal scheme. To make a long story short, YouTube has a strong law on its side- it's part of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act- that immunizes it from a lot of liability.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: I know you say it's a long story, and it is, but I'm going to ask you to make that [LAUGHS] long story short and give us a little history- basically, how the battle over intellectual property became an escalating tug-of-war between content providers and telephone companies.

TIM WU: Well, imagine yourself back in the early 1990s, when people thought that grunge music was here to stay, and imagine there's this thing called the information superhighway. The lobbyists for the film industries and the television industries and music industries had great concerns. They saw what was coming. And they asked Congress to pass laws that would have made the Internet as liable as a bookstore for every single thing it carries.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Now, the telephone companies hated that bookstore analogy.

TIM WU: You know, they preferred the telephone analogy. You and I, maybe after the show, could plot to rob a bank over the telephone, and the telephone companies have never been liable for all the numerous bad things that happen over the telephone.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: And, obviously, this was all taking place when the Internet was entirely dial-up and the telephone companies were providing the connectivity.

TIM WU: And after a sort of battle royale between famous Washington lobbyists, they eventually came up with a deal. The phone companies and Internet hosting companies are not liable for the materials until they are told that they're actually there. Then they have to take them down. And so that allows companies like YouTube Google, Facebook, MySpace, a million different types of web companies to come into existence under the cover of this safe harbor legislation. And so it was really a big turning point in the Internet's history.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: You note in your piece the structure has created a whole new way to use copyrighted material. You used to have fair use, which was legal, illegal use, which was piracy, and something which occurs every day on YouTube, which is called tolerated use, meaning it's not, strictly speaking, legal, but the content providers like the exposure.

TIM WU: That's right - use that is illegal if someone complains about it, so it's tolerated. And it sounds like that would be really bad for content owners, but in some ways they like it. And the reason they like it is it allows them to have stuff exposed to the public, and if they really don't like what's going on, then they can have it taken down in an instant.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Yeah, it would seem to be, as you say, absolutely within their control. They want to debut, say, a new TV show. They let lots of clips create buzz on YouTube. Once they've got enough buzz, they take it down. Free advertising.

TIM WU: I mean, that's been the central tension with YouTube and all of Internet content is the first reaction is, wait a second, a million people have stolen our show! And then the next second they say, wait a second, a million people are watching our show!

BROOKE GLADSTONE: [LAUGHS]

TIM WU: So they have this pathological hatred of piracy, hating losing control over your work. On the other hand, they also love buzz. They want people to see their stuff.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: And YouTube will thrive between those poles in a way that Napster couldn't, because Napster was created explicitly to exchange copyrighted material.

TIM WU: Right. Napster was kind of a pimp. You went there because you wanted to get, you know, the goods. YouTube runs the YouTube hotel. Then you can check in, you can do good stuff, you can do bad stuff. There is still on YouTube a lot of stupid human tricks that people like to watch, and right now it's kind of a testing ground where things become exposed, builds buzz. And then the industry needs to learn how gradually to start making more money off of that.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: So amid all of this tolerated use, and, at the same time, the industry talking so big about piracy, do content providers risk looking like hypocrites?

TIM WU: If that was their concern, then they've been in trouble for about 100 years.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: [LAUGHS]

TIM WU: You know, you can call it hypocrisy. You can call it compromise.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Tim, thanks a lot.

TIM WU: It's been fun. Thanks so much.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Tim Wu is a professor at Columbia Law School and author of Who Controls the Internet?