YouTube Does Something Right

Finally, in the ongoing turf wars between traditional IP owners and the online remix culture, sanity and greed have prevailed.

The announcement came down yesterday that indie label Rumblefish will start selling licenses for songs from its catalog that will allow users to use the music in non-commercial web videos. The best part? The license for each song will only cost $1.99 a pop, purchasers will be allowed to edit the songs however they want, and the rights last in perpetuity. Finally, after years of DMCA skirmishes and countless Youtube videos stripped of their audio tracks, a fairly sizable music distributor has realized that they're sitting on top of a potentially lucrative new revenue stream and giving users a way to legally use their music for benign purposes, like adding soundtracks to videos of dogs on skateboards and slide shows of Robert Pattinson photos. Rumblefish is not a major label so most popular songs won't be available, but this is an important first step. If they can prove that this kind of IP licensing scheme can be profitable, the big four are sure to follow.

The most significant part of this deal is the partnership with Youtube. By using the Rumblefish service, users can avoid the hassle of dealing with Youtube's notorious automated Content ID program that seeks out and blocks or disables any video deemed to have infringing material. Youtube has long been criticized by groups such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a legal advocacy group, for making it far too easy for IP owners to block access to work they deem objectionable, whether those works are actually infringing or not. Many popular remixers, vidders, and other gray-area user generated content creators have abandoned the site for other video sharing platforms as a result. Until now, Youtube and the music companies haven't been able to provide any viable means by which such content could be legitimized, for those creators who would be willing to pay to do so.

Music licenses for commercial purposes, as any aspiring filmmaker will tell you, is often prohibitively expensive and covers far more than the average Youtube user will ever need. Non-commercial licenses, like the Creative Commons licenses which require no licensing fee at all for non-commercial use, have been growing in popularity among musicians and other artists. Rumblefish's new Friendly Music service marks the most ambitious attempt by a commercial music entity to find a workable happy medium, that will let the users do what they want with the songs, provide some modest returns for the company and artists, and hopefully promote some lesser-known music in the process. There's no guarantee that licensing is going to catch on with video creators, but at least the option will be available as a real alternative to the rigidity of the traditional music licensing.

However, I am concerned that in the long run this kind of scheme might end up narrowing the fair use exception to copyright, which allows for excerpts of copyrighted media to be used without license fees if the use falls into certain categories like for educational or commentary purposes in the US. Unknowing users may end up paying to license content that they're perfectly within their rights to use without a license. Consider the wider implications of this. I'd imagine that if the music licensing goes well, the next step will be licensing videos. I expect that this will be more difficult to implement, but let's say the IP holder wants to charge something like $4.99 for a three minute clip, which would include both audio and video. That's roughly the same length as an average song.

So if someone wants to make a video using the famous three-minute Hitler rant from "Downfall," it would be easy to pay the one-time fee and never have to worry about Youtube yanking it, the way they have with other Hitler meme videos earlier in the year. The problem is, of course, that most of the Hitler videos arguably fall under the parody or criticism exceptions to copyright. Also, putting a monetary price on being able to create these remix videos obviously gives an advantage to those who are in a position to pay. Five dollars may seem insignificant to most users based in the US, but what about those in the developing world? What about those who are indigent? Licensing wouldn't solve the fundamental problem of Youtube overzealously policing their site's content. It just provides a way for some accused infringers to pay their way out of the hassle. But some perfectly innocent parties will not be able to, which is going to mean a lot of protected speech is still potentially getting quashed.

But for now, I think this is a positive development. Notably, the announcement of the new licensing service comes just a little more than a week after a US District Court ruled that Youtube is protected by the safe harbor provisions of the DMCA, denying Viacom's ability to collect damages for copyright infringement on the part of Youtube users. Viacom is going to appeal the decision, of course, but for now Youtube can stop being so intimidated by the demands of the big media companies and start paying attention to the rights of its users again. And if Viacom can't beat Youtube, maybe they'll be more receptive to joining them instead. Because if Youtube and Rumblefish really have found a way to monetize the online remix culture, maybe - just maybe, everybody wins.