The chiliads of amateur videos uploaded on Google's video sharing website, YouTube has been removed by the Warner Music Group, because of its ongoing copyright dispute with YouTube. The users of Google's supersite have found thousand of the user-created YouTube videos either removed or their audios turned off.

The New York Times has reported that the YouTube users were surprised when they found their videos vanished from the site. The paper has cited the case of a high school sophomore Juliet Weybret, who posted a video of herself playing piano and singing "Winter Wonderland," but her video disappeared. When she enquired, YouTube informed her that her video was removed "as a result of a third-party notification" by the Warner Music Group.

"Thousands of videos disappeared, either they turned off the audio, or they pulled the video," said Fred von Lohmann, a lawyer for the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

According to the New York Times, "Many of the videos taken down are non-commercial family videos that contain clips of a Warner song in the background or videos that cover many of Warner's tracks".

Will Tanous, a Warner Music spokesman, said, "We and our artists share the user community's frustration when content is unavailable. YouTube generates revenues from content posted by fans, which typically requires licenses from rights holders. Under the current process, we make YouTube aware of WMG content. Their content ID tool then takes down all unlicensed tracks, regardless of how they are used."