Who owned the whitehouse channel on YouTube before Obama?

Since his inauguration, Obama has launched a new YouTube channel called " whitehouse ". It is a beautifully designed channel which right now has 4 videos. Interestingly, it was registered on the 21st January 2006.

Here is a curious piece of information about the channel.

When we started monitoring the channel and its videos after the inauguration, we found that our database came up with 8 videos instead of 4. On closer inspection, there were 4 videos that did not belong there:

We discovered those videos on the whitehouse channel in August 2007. It seems the White House had no interest in the channel at that time. We have probably not updated our information about this channel since August 2007, so we do not know who owned it originally, or when the transfer happened. But it has made us wonder: since channel names on YouTube are at least as rare as Domain names, is there are market for channel name squatters just like domain name squatters? And .. did the Whitehouse have to pay to get the channel?

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