RSSYouTube, Warner Partner; Universal Threatens
By Ed Oswald | Published September 18, 2006, 11:40 AM
Depending on which music label you talk to, YouTube is either a friend or foe. The company on Monday said it had reached an agreement with Warner Music to stream music videos, behind-the-scenes footage, artist interviews and original programming. Contrast this with Universal, which apparently threatened to sue the video-sharing site last week.
The deal with Warner is expansive; not only does it include the rights to stream video content from the fourth-largest record label, but it would also give rights to users to incorporate Warner music into the videos they create and upload. Revenue from advertising appearing on pages with Warner music would be shared, YouTube said.
Calculating revenue, as well as protecting the content from Warner, would require some changes on YouTube's part. Thus, the company announced it would be making modifications to its system as a result to ensure the integrity of the videos streamed.
Meanwhile, while all seems to be rosy with Warner, YouTube is facing what appears to be a imminent lawsuit from Universal Music, whose CEO Doug Morris told investors last week that the video sharing site along with MySpace owed Universal tens of millions in royalties and planned to "reveal shortly" actions against the sites.
Universal and YouTube had been in discussions, but those have apparently fallen apart. The site already has a deal with NBC, signed in June, which included Universal television shows. However, the music arm is no longer aligned with that division, which explains the mixed message sent by the two companies.
A spokesperson for Universal later backtracked, saying Morris was answering a question from the audience and was not outwardly threatening legal action. Representatives from YouTube were not available for comment.
Youtube is a fun, unproductive and perfect for advertising it's a dream actually. Any company where their content is uploaded by users stand to gain substantial marketing for free. Now if you have a company suing youtube for allowing people to upload their content that is copyrighted everyone from youtube to the company who is suing is losing, and that's sad.
These companies need to wake up and realize that we are in the digital age. A whole lot of people are spending up to hundreds of hours a month on the computer. Not jumping on tremendously popular sites like myspace and youtube is a mistake. Trying to bring them into court to stop them is bad PR and that's about it.
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You make a rather hilarious point. The interesting thing about all this is that the online advertising industry is one of the biggest evils (yes I said evil) found on the net. So if they want to shoot themselves in the foot...so be it. If these people want to keep this up, we will all benefit by the reduction of adware/spyware aswell as spam and popups.
Many of the things that people call "evil" are really not evil, they are just very bad things. But, considering what this industry has done to the internet experience, I'm all for these people hurting their own ability to move forward.
The weaker the online advertising companies get, the happier everyone will be.
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