Artists Get Royalties from YouTube Clips
September 8th, 2007 Posted in NewsYouTube, a major video sharing website with over thousands of users throughout the world, may not be out of its copyright infringement issues yet, but it definitely has something new to offer artists today.
Reports from The Guardian, a leading London-based newspaper, say that over 500,000 music artists will now receive royalties for each time their songs are played in YouTube or when users upload tracks from the website. This acts as a clever move from a website that has long been receiving legal suits from one establishment after another.
It must be noted that earlier this year, the French Soccer League among others grouped together to file suit against what they see was an unauthorized video. A report from the Chicago Tribune reveals that the lawsuit was initiated by England’s Football Association Premier League and followed through by French tennis and soccer leagues. It was alleged that copyright infringement with sports and music clips posted in the website without their permission was the root of the issue.
Thus, the move for giving artists royalty proves a fresh start for the website. A new deal between YouTube and the MCPS-PRS Alliance, a group based in the United Kingdom is responsible for its conception.
The MCPS-PRS Alliance is an organization that collects royalties for record labels in the United Kingdom. It has also licensed 10 million tracks for use in YouTube. The Guardian reports that Google did not give any figure, but pointed to the returns they expect to receive from business.
This move proves to be favorable especially to individual artists and the music industry who seem to be casualties in copyright infringement issues. YouTube may have already learned from its past the lessons of intellectual property rights, which is sadly ignored and unchecked even among large websites. As the internet grows in unheeded proportions, gatekeeping or sorting out copyright infringing video clips have become more difficult to do.
Meanwhile, further reports disclose that copyright owners such as Viacom have hired people to look into YouTube. The Wall Street Journal reports that a company by the name of BaySTP has hired about 20 web analysts to “clean up” video-sharing websites for proprietary material. Once found of copyright laws violation, BaySTP alarms websites. The company issues around a million notices a month and bills around five TV and movie-studio clients up to 500,000 dollars. BaySTP, in short, acts like a “web police.”
Even with the strong presence of web policing agencies like BaySTP, analysts have still found that copyright infringing video clips would oftentimes go back after being issued a notice. Besides, analysts say, BaySTP also has reported falsely on non-infringing clips such as parodies. However, the company answers back to this, saying that it only has 0.1 percent error.
A rather advanced way YouTube has employed for a cleaner website is its video identification technology, courtesy of Time-Warner and Disney. A report from Reuters suggests a new fingerprinting technology that will aid the website in identifying infringing clips. As more and more consumers log in to the website, demand from its management to tidy it up becomes more resounding, which YouTube has so far responded well.
