High growth, high traffic sites like MySpace and YouTube are poster children for the Web 2.0 concept of letting your users create your content. But, there are sometimes problems when one lets users post whatever they want - spam, inappropriate content, and, of course, content that is owned by others. There’s been speculation about whether content like commercial music videos would be allowed at sites like YouTube, and apparently that question will be answered soon. According to a FoxNews report, Morris: YouTube, MySpace Abuse Copyright, Universal Music will announce their plans for dealing with what they see as unauthorized use of their copyrighted content:
Universal Music Group, the world’s largest record company, contends the wildly popular Web sites YouTube and MySpace are violating copyright laws by allowing users to post music videos and other content involving Universal artists. “We believe these new businesses are copyright infringers and owe us tens of millions of dollars,”Universal Music CEO Doug Morris told investors Wednesday at a conference in Pasadena.”How we deal with these companies will be revealed shortly.”
Donna Bogatin at the Digital Micro Markets blog notes that Morris doesn’t want to leave any Web 2.0 money on the table, quoting him as saying, “(MTV) built a multibillion-dollar company on our (music) … for virtually nothing. We learned a hard lesson.”
Morris certainly seems to be adopting an aggressive posture that’s unlikely to be resolved without a substantial financial settlement or elimination of the offending content.
There’s plenty of reaction around the Web. Michael Parekh is surprised that the music industry didn’t jump on the social networking sites as quickly as they did Napster. Jason S isn’t surprised that Universal is doing this, but wonders how this will affect the many homemade videos using commercial music as a soundtrack. (Some of the most popular recent YouTube videos have been music video parodies of titles like Shakira’s “Hips Don’t Lie” - do we want to deprive millions of Web surfers of great content like this?) TechnoLlama thinks the music firms are a few eons behind the times, noting in Copyright Implications of the Social Web, “Universal and their ilk are dinosaurs, or more accurately, they resemble coelcanths, living fossils if you may.” The 463 Inside Tech Policy blog speculates that Universal is the designated “bad cop” of the music industry - in essence, Universal can be the looming stick while other industry firms offer carrots to the social network sites.
Some sort of showdown was inevitable. I think that big sites like MySpace and YouTube don’t have a lot to gain from protracted litigation with the music industry. They’ll reach some kind of settlement that will end up being the model smaller sites with less legal firepower will be forced to follow. At least MySpace has sufficient resources not to get steamrolled by the music firms; perhaps if they do a good negotiating job it will benefit many websites other than their own.
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