The music industry is banding together in a fight against YouTube, and seeking to change the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) in the process. YouTube has become the latest enemy of the music industry, as many throughout the industry have accused YouTube of not paying enough in royalties for music streamed through the service. Artists throughout the industry are now calling for changes in copyright law that will prevent YouTube, and other companies, from acting in such a way that keeps royalties from artists. Big name stars in the industry such as Katy Perry, Pharrell Williams, and Billy Joel have all added their voices to the growing chorus of those calling for change, with all signing letters asking for changes to copyright laws. Under the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), sites that host potentially illegal third-party material are protected, so long as they respond to valid complaints by a copyright holder in a “timely fashion.” Under the DMCA, artists can issue take down notices to sites like YouTube for potentially unauthorized copies of their work. Many within the music industry argue that the takedown notices are not enough, and YouTube is not paying artists enough compared to the amount of their content YouTube publishes on its site. As proof of this, many point to YouTube’s own numbers which show the site has paid out about $3 billion in royalties since 2005, whereas Spotify, the popular music streaming service, paid out $1.8 billion for licensing and other costs just last year.

Illegally uploaded work on YouTube has become such a problem for the industry that after Taylor Swift released her newest album, “1989”, Universal Music was forced to put together a full-time team whose sole jobs were to search the site for unauthorized copies, with the team ultimately issuing over 66,000 takedown notices to YouTube. YouTube argues that its Content ID system, which has been previously discussed on this site, is helping copyright owners keep track of their material, claiming that 99.5% of copyright claims are made through Content ID. Some throughout the music industry argue that the DMCA creates a “new form of piracy” because copyrighted songs are so easily uploaded back onto sites like YouTube once they have been removed.

Others have argued that overzealous copyright owners within music industry are part of the problem. Managing these takedown notices has become increasingly difficult for sites like YouTube with the advent of “DMCA bots”, which automatically search sites for infringing content then issue a takedown notice once they locate potentially infringing content. Many argue that the music industry has been abusing this portion of the DMCA by using these bots, which have inundated many sites like YouTube with takedown notices; Google recently reported that it handles an average of 75,000,000 DMCA takedown notices each month, a significant leap from the hundreds of thousands of monthly takedown notices it reported handling in 2011, and an astronomical jump from the eight per month Google had to handle in the early 2000s.

If the music industry is able to successfully lobby for a change to the law, many are concerned that its influence will be felt not just by industry giants like YouTube, but across the internet. James Grimmelman, a law professor at the University of Maryland, argues, “Anything that rewrites the D.M.C.A. isn’t just going to affect YouTube, it is going to affect blogs … it is going to affect fan sites … it is going to affect places for game creators and documentarians and all kinds of others.”

As the voices grow louder and more influential, changing how they pay out royalties to copyright owners seems like an ever likely reality for YouTube; the implications this change will have beyond YouTube, across the internet, remains to be seen.

Sources: http://gizmodo.com/musicians-ask-for-change-to-copyright-law-to-fight-yout-1779810003 http://gizmodo.com/googles-copyright-takedowns-have-grown-by-a-trillion-pe-1763241873

For more information on this topic, please visit our DMCA Compliance service page, which is part of our Internet and eCommerce practice.

Klemchuk LLP is an Intellectual Property (IP), Technology, Internet, and Business law firm located in Dallas, TX. The firm offers comprehensive legal services including litigation and enforcement of all forms of IP as well as registration and licensing of patents, trademarks, trade dress, and copyrights. The firm also provides a wide range of technology, Internet, e-commerce, and business services including business planning, formation, and financing, mergers and acquisitions, business litigation, data privacy, and domain name dispute resolution. Additional information about the intellectual property law firm and its intellectual property attorneys may be found at www.klemchuk.com.

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