YouTube vs. Warner
January 26th, 2009 by Lior ShamirGoogle’s VP of Content Partnership, David Eun, said that YouTube “is not screwing the labels, and, if anything, needs to partner more closely with them”, in response to Warner Music Group’s demand that YouTube remove every video from WMG’s catalogue.
Google acquired YouTube in 2006 for $1.65 billion in an all-stock transaction. It has since been working closely with record labels and independent rights owners on a number of mechanical royalty models for balanced and mutual content monetization, at which point, it struck a ‘blanket license’ deal with Warner. However, Warner has not been able to re-negoatiate terms with Google who, resultantly, had to remove videos under WMG’s authorship or which contain copyright associated with WMG’s publishing. As this amounts to a great many clips which are now ‘unplayable’, YouTube, the world’s largest video portal, can no longer claim to provide “infinite choice”, at least under the music category which will no longer include Madonna, REM and Eric Clapton, to name a few. Quite a blow.
The feud has snowballed and YouTube users are documenting their frustration on the video portal. Here’s one version I enjoyed watching:
And from the victim’s perspective: