The problem, of course, is what "they" do when they get there. Over the last couple of years, prototypical Web 2.0 sites such as YouTube and MySpace have grown into multibillion-dollar businesses on the buzz and excitement generated by user-supplied content. Increasingly, however, that growth has been accompanied by charges that the sites were either unwittingly or even knowingly allowing users to post and distribute copyrighted materials.

For YouTube, matters came to a head this week when a "traditional" media company -- Viacom -- filed a $1 billion lawsuit against the Google-owned Web site to enforce its copyrights. The stark question is whether the dynamic Web 2.0 paradigm can survive an old-fashioned legal onslaught. Can a business function legally if it allows unregulated user contributions?

The practice of user uploads and social networking long predates the term Web 2.0 (which the media company O'Reilly coined in 2004). Well before the arrival of Web 1.0, in fact, computer bulletin boards flourished for precisely the same reasons: Users could upload files and even images for download by other bulletin board users, and users could also locate and communicate with people with similar interests. At the height of their popularity in 1988 and 1989, there were hundreds of thousands of bulletin boards in operation around the country.

Not surprisingly, though, copyright infringement was a rampant problem on bulletin board systems. Both Playboy and Penthouse filed several high-profile lawsuits against BBS operators for copyright infringement, and aggressively worked to get their protected content taken down.

In 1999, another direct ancestor of the Web 2.0 model was launched by Shawn Fanning: Napster, a program that allowed users to share music from their personal hard drives through Napster's central servers. Within a fairly short time, however, Napster was hit by copyright infringement litigation from bands (most notably Metallica) and various record labels, and in July 2001, was ordered to shut down its entire network. Other file-sharing systems (and their users) have faced similar copyright suits.

Survival of Web 2.0 (and YouTube)

"I've certainly seen the analogies to Napster," said Scott Kessler, an analyst with Standard & Poor's, "but I think that there are some important difference." He said it's important to remember that, unlike YouTube, Napster had no content in its system except for copyrighted material, and pointed out that both YouTube and Google have several successful partnerships in place. "Those relationships," he said, "can provide models for resolving this dispute."

Kessler also argued that the concept of Web 2.0 is much larger than YouTube's video-sharing. "The term 'Web 2.0' definitely encompasses a number of video-sharing sites," he said, "and the implications for them following this lawsuit are perhaps not as good. My sense is that companies that have business models similar to YouTube might think twice [about] continuing as they have been, given the risks raised by an imposing lawsuit."

But, he added, "there are many 2.0 sites that don't have video, or for which video is a de minimis piece of their business plan. Those sites will not really be affected by the Viacom litigation."

And even those sites that do rely on video, Kessler said, such as YouTube and Joost, are actively developing software that will better enable them to monitor and control the content that users upload.