Warner Music Group just screwed up big time. It seems Youtube had a contract with WMG to allow users’ use of WMG music in their videos. Also, WMG put their catalog of music videos directly on Youtube. The contract expired, WMG was greedy, and now they want all of their content deleted.
Idiots.
Everybody’s mad about it. From artists who had their videos removed, to people using WMG music in the background of a video, to the EFF, to everybody else.
Now, I’m not going to say much about the publicity/creativity stupidness of this decision. Everybody else has covered that rather throughly. (I would like to point out – the ethics of ‘content sharing’ and copyright in general is still an open question. 800 years ago, an author would have been honored that someone would want to make copies of their work!)
No, here’s why this decision is so incredibly bad: You don’t delete web content. Especially not mass amounts of web content. By rendering millions of videos useless, either by removal or muting, a large chunk of the web just went dead. And who knew – the Internet is a big place, with lots of distractions. Users who find a dead link, just drop that line of inquiry and do something completely different (Something they can actually find!) In other words, if that Beyonce video, or even, say, the hamster dancing to Metallica goes away, guess what? Ooh… shiny podcast in the next tab. Close this one! That means we’re not going to be listening to WMG content. At all. And I’m pretty sure that’s not what they wanted.
Once again – Idiots.