Law & Policy

Copyright pressures on YouTube are mounting as media companies struggle to find the right balance between the marketing value of exposure on the top media-sharing site and actually getting paid for their content. "Viacom Inc., parent of MTV and Comedy Central, said it has ordered YouTube to immediately remove more than 100,000 video clips placed on the popular Web site without its approval," the … [Read more...] about An experiment in the YouTube ‘lab’

Note what kids in the UK are doing on phones and you'll see what's coming to the US. Copyright law isn't exactly on the minds of British child cellphone users. A recent survey found that almost a third of UK 8-to-13-year-olds share music with their phones – "using the built-in Bluetooth wireless feature of many phones … but without the consent of copyright holders," the BBC reports, and "almost a … [Read more...] about UK kids’ tune-swapping on phones

The music business is still suing individual file-sharers (see this latest example, reported by the Associated Press), but the newest front in its war on copyright theft is social networking – not just in tunes downloaded and shared, but in the background music of videos upload to YouTube, MySpace, and other social and media sites. To help music fans at your house understand how these companies … [Read more...] about ‘Music detective’ tech

It's messy and confusing on all fronts, it seems, from not knowing what player tunes will play on to not knowing what is and isn't legal. In "simpler times," one pretty much knew the file-sharing networks were virtually all illegal. Now sites like MySpace and YouTube are both threat and opportunity to the music industry, the Washington Post reports. MySpace, on which more than 3 million bands and … [Read more...] about Messy time for music

Apparently being acquired for $1.65 billion is good news and bad news for YouTube. As for the latter, there's the ongoing copyright battle, apparently leading to the deletion of tens of thousands of video clips from TV shows, the next challenge being X-rated video, no doubt. But the big news at this point is YouTube's purging of video from Comedy Central, including clips from "YouTube stalwarts … [Read more...] about The legalization of YouTube?