Warner to license music in YouTube videos
YouTube and Warner Music Group Corp. will announce a deal Monday that will put thousands of Warner music videos on the video sharing site and allow user created videos to legally use Warner owned music, according to a story tonight from the Associated Press. YouTube is reported to have created technology that will automatically detect when copyrighted music is used in videos, give Warner the right to accept or reject those videos and will calculate the royalty fees Warner is owed. Financial details haven’t been disclosed yet, but may include a cut of advertising revenue in exchange for licensing rights. It’s also unclear who will pay the royalty fees; that payment may come out of the advertising revenue or it may be demanded of the individual users who have put Warner music in their videos. That could get interesting. Warner’s last experiment on YouTube, the Paris Hilton channel – was widely seen as a failure.
This is big news, as the legal dilemma of copyrighted content has been the primary barrier to YouTube’s possible acquisition and has presumably cost the company in possible advertising revenues. If a similar deal can be made with other record labels, the landscape of user generated content could be changed radically. The Warner deal stands in major opposition with the position of Universal, whose CEO Doug Morris said last week that YouTube and MySpace owed the label millions. Morris indicated that a legal challenge might be forthcoming.
From Techcrunch
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