YouTube says “I do!”

As you may already now, You Tube is an Internet phenomenon with a success rarely seen before. In just 19 months, the site which was started in a Silicon Valley garage by two young men, now receives 100 million page views and 10 million visitors per day.

Unfortunately, by offering users the chance to upload virtually any video content, some problems appeared. Music companies became concerned about this new way of sharing videos, as copyrighted videos were uploaded and viewed by millions of people, without legal permission. The matter went so far that Universal Music described YouTube and the social networking site MySpace of being “copyright infringers” who owe the music industry “tens of millions of dollars” raising rumors that a future lawsuit its close by.

On the other hand, an Universal Music competitor, Warner Music went on the principle “if you can’t fight them, join them” and signed a commercial agreement with YouTube in which it agrees to transfer thousands of its music videos and interviews to YouTube.
Even more important is that Warner Music has agreed to license its songs to the millions of ordinary people who upload their homemade videos to the Web site.

The financial aspect of the deal implies that both companies would share revenue from advertising on both music videos uploaded by the artist and user uploaded videos that incorporate audio and visual works from Warner’s catalog. To make the deal happen, YouTube developed a royalty-tracking system that will detect when homemade videos are using copyrighted material.

The marriage between YouTube and Warner comes as surprise in times of incertitude about the copyrighted material uploaded on YouTube. But if the trend continues, we will soon witness the birth the widest spread video channel.