The “wild west” days of video sharing sites is over. YouTube has gone corporate, and the music industry is going after other sites to make them limit copyright abuse.

Universal Music has announced that it’s suing two video-sharing websites in the US. The firm has accused both Grouper and Bolt of allowing “mass infringement” of copyright by letting users swap videos that feature unlicensed Universal music. It wants damages of up to $150,000 for each video distributed on the websites without permission.

Bolt’s chief executive, Aaron Cohen, maintains his site removes copyrighted material as soon as it is notified.

“There’s no question that people upload copyrighted content from time to time,” said Bolt CEO Aaron Cohen. “Occasionally we receive official notices to remove content and we do.”

Universal Music claims that the sites have built their value through “use and exploitation of copyrighted material”.

“Grouper and Bolt cannot reasonably expect to build their business on the backs of our content without permission,” said a Universal spokesman.

via BBC NEWS

Google’s YouTube copyright woes are beginning. Dick Parsons, CEO of Time Warner, has announced that his group would pursue its copyright complaints against YouTube.

Time Warner, the media and entertainment group that owns the Warner Brothers movie studio, Time Inc magazines and the HBO TV channel, is concerned about illegal use of its material on YouTube.

“You can assume we’re in negotiations with YouTube and that those negotiations will be kicked up to the Google level in the hope that we can get to some acceptable position,” said Parsons.
He denied the decision to pursue any potential infringement was prompted by this week’s acquisition. “We were going to pursue it anyway,” he said. “If you let one thing ignore your rights as an owner it makes it much more difficult to defend those rights when the next guy comes along.”

He took a more emollient stance than some when he said: “We’d like to have our content displayed on these platforms, but on a basis that it respects our rights as the owner of that content.”

via Guardian Unlimited Business

GreedTube doesn’t look like it will be long for this world, unless it makes a few changes.

It’s a very YouTube-like site, with a very YouTube-like name and a very YouTube-like logo that lets you post videos and share in the ad revenue.

Dallas Mavericks owner and former Broadcast.com owner Mark Cuban, thinks that YouTube is doomed.
According to Cuban:

Youtube’s rapid ascension to the top of the traffic ranks can be attributed to two and only two reasons:

1. Free Hosting from any 3rd Party site
Hey, why pay for bandwidth for a video if you dont have to ? A blog, a myspace page, an email, any website. Just throw in some html in Youtube.com foots the bill for bandwidth. Sure you are limited by size of file, but so what. Just chop it up into parts 1 through N. Its fast, easy and free.

Come to our website and use our video hosting services, we can party like its 1999 all over again !

2. Copyrighted music and video.
I dont have a count, but i bet Daniel Powters’ Bad Day is attached to some video snippet of every sporting event ever played , with links sent to fans of every losing team. PIrates season, You had a Bad Day. Spurs vs Mavs. Mavs vs Suns, Mavs vs Heat, Yankees vs Red Sox, etc, etc, etc. Bad Day, Bad Day , Bad Day. If Daniel had a nickel for every time his song was used in a YouTube sports video, he would be a much richer man.

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YouTube and other social networking sites may soon feel the wrath of the music industry.

Universal Music Group, the world’s biggest record company, is putting pressure on popular online sites YouTube and MySpace, because of posts infringing the copyrights of its artists’ music videos.

“The poster child for (user-generated media) sites are MySpace and YouTube,” said Morris. “We believe these new businesses are copyright infringers and owe us tens of millions of dollars.”

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