Digital Home Thoughts: EMI Courts YouTube to Help Fight Pirates

"Record label EMI Music Publishing is talking to YouTube, Revver and other video upload sites about alliances that would help it monitor and curtail misuse of its copyrights--and loss of advertising or download sales--from unauthorized music videos that are posted to their sites. "We're actively trying to strike relationships (with user-generated video sites) for the showing of our music videos," Thomas Ryan, EMI Music's senior vice president of digital and mobile strategy, said Wednesday here at the Piper Jaffray Global Internet Summit, a three-day confab of investors and Internet executives. "It's our hope that those commercial relationships will help us remove infringing material that someone uploaded and we're not being compensated for," Ryan said during a panel discussion about online entertainment. Ryan said EMI is interested in protecting video produced by the label, or video produced by someone else but which infringes on its intellectual property--for example, someone lip-syncing a protected song or who has remixed a music video clip. One solution to the problem is digital tracking technology."

Basically, it sounds like EMI is mostly concerned with people posting music videos that they've recorded off TV to public sites like YouTube when they're trying to create an online on-demand revenue stream from it. I can certainly see their point - I wouldn't want my video posted if I were at the same time trying to make money from it elsewhere (like on my own site), but I have to wonder if this is really such a pressing issue that EMI feels they should be throwing money at it. It's not like YouTube is the only site of its kind out there. Will they be striking a deal with every one of them? And will they make the other labels care too? Personally, I think they should take the iTunes approach and just make the videos so accesible to anyone that almost no one will be willing to go through the effort to get it illegally.