YouTube Now Mutes Videos With Unauthorized Copyrighted Music - ouch! (via Mashable)
Mashable: YouTube Now Mutes Videos With Unauthorized Copyrighted Music. "Perhaps this has been going on for a while, but I’ve never noticed it before. YouTube
users often create an original video using their favorite popular song
as the audio. I’m afraid that they won’t be able to do that much
longer, since YouTube has started muting videos that use unauthorized
copyrighted music (and that pretty much means all user-created videos.) You can see some examples here, here and here. The official notice from YouTube under the video says the following: “This video contains an audio track that has not been authorised by all copyright holders. The audio has been disabled.”
Ouch. This will really hurt. Everyone. The amateur film makers, the artists, Youtube, us - the users. Yes, sure, I know: synchronization [the use of music in a public audio-visual production] is subject to a license by the writer, publisher, label, artist (and another dozen of parties), no matter how small the use. That's the law.
BUT: where will this by-the-book implementation of these laws lead us? The answer is: criminalization.
Youtube (i.e. Google) will be virtually destroying 10s of millions of videos that millions of users have created and uploaded. I understand why Youtube would comply with demands for this, but this is really a bummer - would it not make sense for the music (publishing) industry to instead provide a non-commercial LICENSE for UGC content, and in return get traffic, referrals and shares of ad revenues? Would it not make sense for such a license to be created NOW rather then in 3 years?
Another instance of music industry control obsession that just makes you want to scream if you haven't lived under a rock for the past 5 years. When is Compensation FINALLY going to be more important then Control?
PS: Mashable rocks. Read their blog!
UPDATE
Norwegian Dagbladet comments Techcrunch rips into this topic ReadWriteWeb
